Arisa White
“Once you pay attention to a word and its resonances, everything starts glimmering.”
Arisa White
(c) Nye’ Lynn Tho
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“She approaches words as reference points, rather than endpoints. By reimagining language, she exerts control over her sense of self.”
“This beautifully, honestly conceived genius of a book shook me to the core.”
“In these crisply narrative poems, which unreel like heart-wrenching fragments of film, Arisa White not only names that gaping chasm between father and daughter, but graces it with its true and terrible face. Every little colored girl who has craved the constant of her father’s gaze will recognize this quest, which the poet undertakes with lyric that is tender and unerring.”
Arisa White’s most recent book of poetry is Who’s Your Daddy (Augury Books, 2021), which Patricia Smith praised as “tender and unerring.” Other books include You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened (Augury Books, 2016), finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award, Hurrah’s Nest (VAC Poetry, 2013), a finalist for the NAACP Image Award and the Wheatley Book Award, and A Penny Saved (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2012). The chapbook "Fish Walking" & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. She's also the co-author of the middle grade book, Biddy Mason Speaks Up (Heyday Books, 2019) winner of the Maine Literary Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction. A Cave Canem Fellow, she was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in 2005, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2019. Her poetry has been published widely and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. She was awarded a 2013-14 Cultural Funding grant from the City of Oakland to create the libretto and score for Post Pardon: The Opera, and received, in that same year, an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation to fund the dear Gerald project, which takes a personal and collective look at absent fathers. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations that center narratives of women, queer, and trans people of color.
Selected by the San Francisco Bay Guardian for the 2010 Hot Pink List, Arisa was a 2011-13 member of the PlayGround writers’ pool. She is the recipient of the inaugural Rose O’Neill Literary House summer residency at Washington College in Maryland, and has also received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. As a visiting scholar at San Francisco State University’s The Poetry Center in 2016, she developed a digital special collection on Black Women Poets in The Poetry Center Archives.
In an interview with Hazlitt, White was asked how she worked with memory in Who’s Your Daddy. She responded, “I’m working with it creatively and poetically. . . . thinking about memory, the glimpses of it, the way it shimmers . . . as being, a star within our (personal) constellations. [And] to make it look like a thing, it’s going to require a living body with their own imagination to construct it.”
She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A native New Yorker living in central Maine, Arisa is an assistant professor in English and Creative Writing at Colby College.
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Who's Your Daddy
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Biddy Mason Speaks Up
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You're the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened
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Hurrah's Nest
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