Aria Aber

Aber was raised in Germany, where she was born to Afghan refugees.[2] Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review.

Aber has received awards and fellowships from Kundiman,[3] the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing,[4] and the Whiting Foundation.[5] Aber was the spring 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College.[6] She was formerly a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.[7]

Aber’s first full-length collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was published in September 2019 by University of Nebraska Press.[8]

In a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Claire Schwartz wrote, "Hard Damage — which elaborates a constellation of beauty and terror between Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States — is vexed by the meanings of bringing across."[9]

In an interview at The Yale Review, Aber has stated, "Especially the English language is political, because it has operated as a colonizing force in many places around the world, and changed global indigenous languages forever, if not completely eradicated them. If poetry is “the soul of a nation” (this quote is attributed to T.S. Eliot, though I cannot fact-check the source), and our nation is an empire actively participating in displacement and warfare, it feels only natural to me that these topics surface in poetry."[2]

• Official website
• Pádraig Ó Tuama reads & discusses Aria Aber’s poem The Only Cab Service of Farmington, Maine