About the Author
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth and I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium, selected by Afaa M. Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize.
She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women’s studies.
Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters and is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Clark is currently working on a memoir-in-essays, Begging to be Saved, reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and exploring historical and contemporary methods of Black survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster.
Raves and Reviews
Praise for Scorched Earth
A formally kaleidoscopic work that oscillates between history, family, friendship, love, and the vexed precarity of modern life, Scorched Earth both challenges and soothes at once. But what I love most about these poems, and in Tiana’s poems at large, is the way they name and hold the archive, the barbed histories, the loved ones and the nemeses in our world, with such intelligent tenderness. Here, the ache of lived experience is recast, as it is in our most indelible poems, as sites of wonder and luminosity, where our wounds are—thank god—not merely subjects, but methods.”
—Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
An absolutely magnificent collection of poetry. Clark has a really deft hand with poetic forms…the emotional tenor of the poems, the sensual imagery, the voice.”
—Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
‘I still want joy in the end,’ Tiana Clark writes in Scorched Earth, her searing, expansive new collection of poems. This book begins with an end—the speaker’s divorce—and the poems unpack what it means to have outlived the life you’d expected to have. ‘If my body be a long poem,’ Clark writes, ‘then I want it to go wherever it needs.’ These are poems of black joy, queer love, and radical acceptance of the self. Scorched Earth is a hell of a book.”
—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Scorched Earth is quite the title for this stunning volume in which Tiana Clark challenges our notions of just how many times a poem can turn and just how much any poem can hold. Each page reads as if it is hungry for understanding—of divorce, of Blackness, of the American South, of poetry itself: ‘I want to peg/the canon. So I am running back/and forth between the house of silence/and the house of shame…’ Clark’s is an ever evolving voice that we need to hear!”
—Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tradition
To read Scorched Earth is to touch the electric fire of Tiana Clark’s mind—crackling with visceral, wonderfully dangerous poems exploring the feminine erotic, she writes unapologetically about Black womanhood, sexuality, desire, and its mirror world of grief, doubt, and unbelonging. This collection is a celebration of the expanse of Black femininity as its own cosmos of possibility. What a joy to see a poet write so deliciously toward longing, yearning, and ultimately, her own incendiary self.”
—Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon
I can give three reasons for why Tiana Clark is a great poet. One-her self intimacy is really shocking & strong—& she owns it: “O tiana I want to love you there.” Two-she knows where to stop (i.e. end the poem) she puts her finger on it, and it’s true or it feels true. Ultimately, her poetry is one big safe word. That’s three. I never heard it before, it’s crazy gorgeous, and it stops everything.”
—Eileen Myles, author of I Must Be Living Twice
Praise for I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
If Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood were a blank book bearing that title alone, I would still feel like I was in the presence of a profound lyric gift. It’s astonishing, the heft of that declaration, and the way these poems rise up to meet its rigor and clarity. Toni Morrison commanded writers to “make it political as hell, and make it irrevocably beautiful.” Clark, as if in response, writes, “Let us marvel at the Love and Grace that bought / and brought us here.” The formal dexterity of these poems, the vision that takes us from Daphne to Lorca to Phillis Wheatley to Balanchine to Rihanna to Rukeyser, announces a significant and comprehensive new poetic talent. This beauty is irrevocable—Clark has written one of the best first books of poetry I have ever read.”
—Kaveh Akbar
Critiquing the commodification of black pain while also acknowledging and revealing your hurt as a black person is tricky as hell. It is dangerous. And that is precisely what Tiana Clark does in these beautiful, vulnerable, honest poems. It is a kind of tenderness, and a kind of belief. A reaching toward. It is a kind of care.”
—Ross Gay
Superlatives for new poets are distressingly common these days, so a reader may not believe me when I say this debut collection is a book that I have waited for all my life. It is a book of relentless beauty about all the territory African-Americans hold close under whispered breaths, an accumulation of history and beauty that I find heartbreaking and breathtaking. More than necessary reading; it’s soul-saving. Read it, and be changed and redeemed.”
—Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman
It’s in this boundless imagination and versatility that Clark earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve Ewing, Nicole Sealy, and Airea D. Matthews.”
—Booklist starred review
Clark bridges a Tennessee landscape’s past and present in her stellar debut, evincing a potent mix of history, injury, and divided identity.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
An honest, punch-angry portrait of being American while black.”
—Library Journal
Such commitment and bravery on the page are vital to this moment in our region’s history, when the calls for a deep reckoning with out troubled legacy have met a dangerous level of entrenchment. With I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, Clark emerges as a necessary voice from the contemporary South.”
—Chapter 16
In the Media
“Here Are the Finalists for the 2025 National Book Awards”
“Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Was Radically Political, if You Knew Where to Look”
“Considering Roe V. Wade, Letters to the Black Body”
“The surreal anticlimax of getting divorced over videoconference”
“We keep revising our idea of Emily Dickinson. We may never get her right.”
