Added to a growing list of poetry awards and accolades, incoming Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Assistant Professor Tiana Clark has won the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starett Prize for Poetry.
The University of Pittsburgh Press (UPP) annually awards the prize to a gifted, burgeoning poet for his or her first full-length book of poetry.
Clark, who will be part of SIUE’s new Master of Fine Arts program, won the award for her book, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. She graduated in 2017 from Vanderbilt’s MFA program, where she served as the poetry editor of the Nashville Review. The UPP will publish Clark’s book Sept. 18.
The book contains approximately 40 poems with the themes of race and identity. It has several elegies, where the poet interviews singer, songwriter and activist Nina Simone, first published African American female poet Phyllis Wheatley and singer, songwriter and actress Rhianna. Clark likes to write in free verse, with a lyrical driven style.
Clark recalls her early memories growing up in the south.
“I moved to Nashville when I was seven,” said Clark. “I encountered the landscape differently. For me, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. Clark intoned. “I cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past—I will always see blood on the leaves.”
Clark also has strong emotions about the plantations in the south.
“There is a lot of plantation tourism in Tennessee,” Clark explained. “I don’t understand it. I think it is important to preserve the past, but the docents need to tell the narratives of all the families that lived and died there. When you go on these tours, most slave narratives are on the margins, barely a footnote.”
“I think because my mother is black and my father is white, I have a complicated relationship to these ancestral histories in my DNA. I reconcile this conflict in my skin through research, pop culture, and various mythologies, weaving my personal narrative through the lives of others.” added Clark, who graduated in 2009 from Tennessee State University where she studied Africana and women’s studies.
Clark is currently the 2017-18 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the author of Equilibrium, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She is the winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, 2016 Academy of American Poets University Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize.
For more information or to pre-order a copy of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, visit Amazon.
Photo: Incoming SIUE Assistant Professor Tiana Clark is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starett Prize for Poetry