Locating and Translating New World Blacknesses

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | A personal interest in international Blacknesses (attuning to both their similarities and differences) was a driving force in Aaron Coleman’s writing long before he began to develop the creative and critical terms to explore it. Coleman’s ongoing interest in the ways in which ethnic identities subvert, coerce, live inside, or move beyond national identities informs not only his work as a translator, but also his work as a poet and educator.

Aaron Coleman is the author of the chapbook St. Trigger, which won the 2015 Button Poetry Prize, judged by Adrian Matejka, and his first full-length collection, Threat Come Close, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March 2018. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, Aaron received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. From Metro-Detroit, Aaron has lived and worked with youth in locations including Chicago, St. Louis, Spain, South Africa, and Kalamazoo. Former Public Projects Assistant at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, winner of the Tupelo Quarterly TQ5 Poetry Contest, The Cincinnati Review Schiff Award, and the American Literary Translator Association’s 2017 Jansen Memorial Fellow, Aaron’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in Washington University St. Louis’ Comparative Literature PhD program.