Aaron Coleman

Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. Aaron is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. William Fulbright Program, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. He 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, The New York Times, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. After earning his MFA in Poetry at Washington University in Saint Louis and working in the Public Projects Department at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Aaron completed his PhD in Comparative Literature with a Certificate in Translation Studies in 2021.

His first critical book project, Poetics of Afrodiasporic Translation: Negotiating Race, Nation, and Belonging Between Cuba and the United States, investigates translational relationships between Black poets in the United States and AfroCuban poets in order to compare their respective literary traditions and explore the transnational impact of the literary African diaspora in the Americas. Situating his own praxis as a translator and poet in relation to Black US-American poet-translators in the twentieth century (like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes) undergirds his current translation project with Nicolás Guillén’s underexamined 1967 collection, El gran zoo [The Great Zoo].

Aaron Coleman is the founder of The Patchwork Project: A Home for Black Translators & Writers, a virtual meeting ground and online database where Black translators and writers from different locations and languages of the African diaspora can partner and work with each other. The name of this endeavor, The Patchwork Project, honors quilting practices in Black communities of the Great Migration and U.S. South that bring together disparate textiles – textures that remain unique even as they are connected – to create an eclectic, storytelling whole.