Aaron Coleman

Dr. Coleman is a poet, translator, comparatist, and 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 is committed to crafting new language to express the complexity and capaciousness of Blackness not only in the United States, but across interconnected histories of racial colonialism in the hemispheric Americas and global African Diaspora. His research interests include Poetry and Poetics in the long 20th and 21st Century, Afrodiasporic Literature (Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone focus), Black USAmerican Literature, Caribbean Literature (with a focus on Cuba), Translation Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Creative Writing. He is currently at work on his first critical monograph tentatively titled, “Poetics of Afrodiasporic Translation: Negotiating Race, Nation, and Belonging Between Cuba and the United States.” Coleman establishes a comparative close reading methodology to analyze what he defines as “poetics of Afrodiasporic translation,” or the many literary and sociocultural strategies used by Afrodescendant translators to translate Afrodescendant poets writing in other languages or countries. By examining translational relationships between Black poets in the United States and AfroCuban poets, his project compares their respective poetics and literary traditions while, at the same time, creating a framework to analyze how poets and translators craft texts that speak to a range of formal and sociocultural issues in (inter)national contexts. Situating his own praxis as a translator and poet in relation to Black USAmerican poet-translators in the twentieth century (such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes) undergirds his current translation project with Nicolás Guillén’s underexamined 1967 collection, El gran zoo [The Great Zoo].

Dr. Coleman’s poetry investigates race, place, sex, shame, and faith in relation to myths and histories of Blackness, Americanness, and masculinity. He embraces an array of lyric, narrative, and experimental forms to write through interstices of inheritance, memory, and imagination at familial, national, and diasporic scales. His first collection, "Threat Come Close" (Four Way Books, 2018), is anchored by an invented hagiography of saints including, among others, Saint Trigger, Saint Seduction, the bilingual Santa Soledad, Saint Window, and Saint Who. Attuned to legacies of creative survival in syncretic Afrodescendant religions like Santería and Voudoun, "Threat Come Close" fathoms the manifold relationships between public and personal histories, mythologies, and Black radical imagination. Funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, Coleman’s forthcoming second collection, "Red Wilderness" (Four Way Books, 2024), crafts a multigenerational chorus of poems spanning six generations of people and places across Coleman’s familial history before, during, and after the Great Migration. "Red Wilderness" reimagines an intimate, living archive that maps myths and realities of blood, boundaries, geography, and genealogy.