Saretta Morgan
“I don’t write anything that moves me away from that feeling of softness. If I can’t say what I need to say in language that preserves the warmth and generosity of spirit I feel when sharing who I am with someone I love, then I don’t say it at all. At least not that day.”
“The scale of intimacy Morgan lays forth in the pages of Alt-Nature broach timelines of militarism, genocide, and all that nature has archived in resistance to imperialism.”
“What is love set against and within austerity? Not the sudden lushness of oasis, but a discipline. Saretta Morgan’s keen-whetted Alt-Nature traces intimacies through severe stations—the military, border deserts, the Anthropocene—and finds/maps there the alterity of Black thought and life, which is to say, disciplines sharpened in harsh space-time. As I read and re-read Morgan’s forceful collection, I find looseness and humor in nevertheless taut syntax, unease in certainty, shade in her generosity. This is etho-poetry as much as ecopoetry, an exacting meditation on what it is to cultivate freedom in “emotional fields of decay.” Alt-Nature is utterly gorgeous and, for readers committed to the labor of loving hard despite precarity and scarcity, utterly necessary.”
“Morgan skillfully weaves together landscapes, nuanced reflections on Black and queer identity, and social and ecological commentary in these stirring pages.”
“Saretta Morgan presents ambidextrous poems that palpate the edges of many different borders.”
“In this text, the language of theory takes on the character
of a metaphysics.”
“If I sound a little abstract or obtuse talking about Room for a Counter Interior, it’s only because I don’t think I can really enter its pages with anything other than an aspiration to re-learn.”
Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), which received a 2024 Southwest Book Award and was named a Ms. Magazine Best Poetry Book of the year, and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and room for a counter Interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). Her work engages the ecologies and forms of connectivity that manifest alongside processes of State militarization.
Working across disciplines, she has produced interactive multimedia experiences for public audiences across the U.S., using engagement with texts to catalyze explorations of physical space and social connection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dia Beacon, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others.
A 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists recipient, her work has also received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and POWERHOUSE.
Pedagogically, she takes a values-centered approach to the process of creative writing, drawing attention to how languages emerge through the practice of living intentionally and in alignment with personal values and intuition. She brings curiosity to the ways imagination and personal landscapes (historic, ecological, geographic, social, emotional ...) intersect to form unique poetics in language and otherwise.
Over the past decade she has participated in veteran-led organizing with Veterans for Peace NYC and About Face: Veterans Against the War, as well as the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix, which provides direct support to address the death and suffering of migrants in the Sonoran Desert. Additionally, she has been fortunate to participate in, and learn from, Indigenous-led water protection and food sovereignty work, Black-led community healing initiatives, and trans-led support for detained migrants. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LAND BACK for Indigenous peoples across the earth.
In an interview with TC Tolbert for the University of Arizona’s Poet’s Corner, Tolbert asked at what point in the writing process she considers the reader: “That’s a hard one for me to answer. I'm not sure when. Lately I think about the range of Black women who I love and imagine them all into one room. I ask myself what I have to do to bring everyone into the conversation. It's a kind of proxy to see how many corners of myself I'm speaking from.”
Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she currently lives on Mvskoke lands in Atlanta, GA, where she trains in Capoeira and wild bird rehabilitation.
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(c) Shaunté Glover
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