Tiana Clark, the Jay C. and Ruth Halls poetry fellow at UW-Madison’s Institute of Creative Writing, won the 2017 Anges Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her collection, “I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood.”
“For me, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung,” Clark said in a statement. “This is an image that I cannot escape, but one that I have learned to lean into as I delve into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, my own ancestry and, yes, even Rihanna.”
At UW-Madison, Clark is one of five other fiction and poetry fellows. The program spans for nine months and requires the writers to teach at least one undergraduate creative writing class. She recently graduated from the MFA program at Vanderbilt University, where she served as the poetry editor for the Nashville Review. Next year, she will teach creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
The annual award is presented by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Clark will receive a cash reward of $5,000 and a publishing deal with the Pitt Poetry Series. Writers are eligible to submit their work to the competition only if they have never before had a full-length book of poetry published.
Clark’s winning submission was inspired by her ancestors and the history of Black treatment in the South and will be published in the fall of 2018.
“I cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past — I will always see blood on the leaves,” Clark said.
Clark grew up in Nashville before moving to southern California and then attended Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and Women’s studies.
Equilibrium, one of Clark’s earlier works, was selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition and has about 17 other publications. Additionally, she won the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, the 2016 Academy of American Poets University Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize.
