Aurielle Marie Lucier

Aurielle Marie is an acclaimed writer and cultural practitioner. They’re the author of Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Named the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year and the 2024 Emory University Arts and Social Justice Poetry Fellow, Marie lives in Atlanta on unceded Muskogee land. She writes about Sex, Systems, and the South.

Artist Statement

I categorize my poetics under three primary themes: Sex, Systems, and the South. My poems explore gender, disability, and sexuality; critique racism and intimate violence; and subvert caricatures of the South through queered reexaminations of our complex legacies. I use Black poetics–ideas, aesthetics, and modes of languaging across the canon of Black poetry–as a method of inquiry. I am influenced by the work of Ntozake Shange, Douglas Kearney, Dionne Brand, and oral historians Fannie Lou Hamer and Zora Neale Hurston. I embrace the raucous tenor of Black rhetorics in sound and shape through haughty repetition, invented forms, jubilant vernacular, and other sensorial elements. I am inspired by Fred Moten, who articulates fugitivity as a desire to use disorder as a tool of improvisation. My poems likewise manifest fugitively; they move like jazz, paginated protests, or spells. Readers often must turn a page on its side or read through blurred and stacked text. Audaciously, I write to shift our relationship to power. I don’t believe poetry alone changes the world, but the discipline of these poems offers evidence of more liberatory possibilities for our aliveness. My work seeks to narrow the chasm between poetic theory and praxis.