Biography

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael 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.

(c) Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography

Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, 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 is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Her second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, which moves between ruins and radical love will be published March 4, 2025. 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 methods of Black survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster.

Contact: tianaclarkpoet@gmail.com   

Literary Agent: Jamie Carr | The Book Group

For Speaking Inquiries: Emily Varga, Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau