We are pleased to announce that the 2024 Dartmouth Poet in Residence at The Frost Place will be Aurielle Marie (they/she) of Atlanta, Georgia. They will live at Robert Frost’s former farmhouse in Franconia, NH for the month of July and give a number of readings in the area.
Nominations this year were made by Patricia Smith, and judged by Professor Vievee Francis, TFP’s Dartmouth Liaison. The finalists were Saúl Hernández and Luke Johnson. Marie, Hernández, and Johnson will each give featured readings as part of the online Poetry Seminar this August.
Aurielle Marie (they/she) is a Black and Queer poet, essayist, and cultural curator surviving state violence. They are the author of Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and the 2020 Cave Canem poetry prize winner. Aurielle won the 2021 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, was the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year in poetry, and received the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for bisexual poetry. For their work in literature, Aurielle was named a member of Out Magazine’s 2022 Out100 class and was featured on Good Morning America. In 2023, she was honored as a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. She was a 2022 Movement Journalism Fellow with Scalawag Magazine, a 2019 Lambda Literary Writer in Residence, and has received invitations to fellowships from Tin House, VONA, The Watering Hole, and Kopkind. Their work has been featured in American Poetry Review, the Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Magazine, and on The Slowdown, Teen Vogue, and The Guardian, CNN, The Jennifer Hudson Show, among other platforms. A genderqueer filmmaker and storyteller, Aurielle writes about sex, systems, and The South from a Black Feminist lens.
A Poem by Aurielle Marie
On Being a Poet
“I am glad to have gotten comfortable with a poet’s relationship to failure early, so that risk and exploration feel accessible as tools in my work. The stakes of a writing career are no different than the political and personal stakes this world offers us, and my poems mean to interrogate both. … [E]ven our best poems will fail to meet the urgency of these times if they can not pull the ideas within them, to their feet.”
—Marie
Gumbo Ya Ya
Aurielle Marie’s prize-winning debut, Gumbo Ya Ya, has earned high praise.
“Marie’s poetry collection is one of the most thrilling debuts released in years.”
—Scalawag magazine
“Sweeping and oracular, Marie’s stunning Cave Canem Poetry Prize-winning collection showcases spellbinding performative notes and trailblazing formal innovations.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Gumbo Ya-Ya is a rollick, a gut-screech, the unbridled bellow of a black gxrl, an inscrutable soup that tastes remarkably sharp and feral, like the covetous tip of the poet’s drawn blade. To enter here is to provoke both revolution and revelation, to risk your known life at the feet of a fervid and improbable prophet. This is the realm of gone fathers, vexed ancestors, and the wreckage and resurrection of the black woman. If you pine for sanctuary, no pages here will shield you—no damned creature or concept is safe. Aurielle Marie is where and what poetry already thinks it is.”
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary
A Connection with Lizzo
In other news, Aurielle Marie caught Lizzo’s attention and her glorious gown! Aurielle was an honoree at Out magazine’s 2022 Out100 Awards and Lizzo made sure they had the perfect dress for the occasion.
We are thrilled to have her join us in Franconia, NH this summer as Dartmouth Poet in Residence.
