Tiana Clark

Tiana Clark was raised in Nashville, Tennessee and southern California. She earned her BA in Africana and Women’s Studies from Tennessee State University and her MFA from Vanderbilt University. She is the author of the chapbook Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), which was chosen by Afaa Michael Weaver for the Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and the full-length poetry collection I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as the New Yorker, Poetry magazine, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Best New Poets 2015.

Clark’s other honors and awards include a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a 2019 Pushcart Prize, the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She has held scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop.

Clark teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.