Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Chapbook Prize.
A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow from Metro-Detroit, Aaron has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, New York Times Magazine, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.
After completing an MFA in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis and working in the Public Projects Department at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Aaron is currently a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature on the International Writers Track with a concentration in Translation Studies.
His dissertation focuses on how translation vivifies relationships between Afrodescendant poets in the United States and Cuba. James Weldon Johnson’s and Langston Hughes’ translations of AfroCuban poets like Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés) and Nicolás Guillén add geographic and temporal specificity to the comparison of Afrodescendant poetics from different sites of the African diaspora. Situating his own praxis as a translator and poet in relation to the work of black USAmerican translators in the twentieth century undergirds Coleman’s current translation project with Nicolás Guillén’s underexamined 1967 collection, El gran zoo (The Great Zoo).
