Aaron Coleman

Affiliations: Anti-Racism Collaborative, National Center for Institutional Diversity

Teaching interests:  Dr. Coleman explores relationships between American – in both national and hemispheric senses of the term – and Afrodiasporic literatures by teaching literature, theory, translation, and creative writing. His teaching interests include long 20th-century Poetry & Poetics, Literature of the African Diaspora in the Americas (Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone); 20-21st-Century Multiethnic USAmerican Literature; Black USAmerican Literature, Translation Studies/Literary Translation Theory and Praxis; African Diaspora Studies; AfroCaribbean Literatures; and Creative Writing. Dr. Coleman is particularly interested in teaching courses that engage the poetics of Blackness in national, transnational, and translational contexts; contemporary poetic explorations of sexuality and masculinity; Midwestern U.S. poetics of home, desire, shame, faith, and grace; and experimental or genre-bending poetic forms.

Recent courses:

• "Poetic Methods of Translation" COMPLIT 580: Translation Workshop/ENGLISH 630: Special Topics (meet-together) What strategies and skills do translators use to bring poetry to life in new languages, cultures, and time periods? This course weaves together translation praxis in a workshop setting with seminar discussions of a wide array of translation theories. By juxtaposing praxis and theory this course guides both aspiring translators and students interested in Translation Studies through an exploration of literary translation. Embracing hands-on experimentation, students practice translating a variety of literary works into other languages, forms, genres, and media.

Research interests: 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, 2025), crafts a multigenerational chorus of poems spanning six generations of people and places across Coleman’s familial history from the U.S. Civil War to present day. "Red Wilderness" reimagines an intimate, living archive that maps myths and realities of blood, boundaries, geography, and genealogy.

Book publications:  

• "St. Trigger" (Button Poetry, 2016) Winner of the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, selected by Adrian Matejka. 
• "Threat Come Close" (Four Way Books, 2018) Winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, The Society of Midland Authors Poetry Honoree.  
• "The Great Zoo" by Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman (University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poet Series, 2024)
• "Red Wilderness" (forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2025)

Other publications:

Selected Publications:

• "'The History Behind the Feeling': A Conversation with Claudia Rankine" The Spectacle (2015)
• “Necessary Apparitions: How Contemporary Poets of Color Embrace the Supernatural to Express Radical Vulnerability” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters 40.3 (2017) 
• “Too Far North” The New York Times, introduced by Terrance Hayes (2017)
• “Translator Profile: Aaron Coleman” Translation Review 102.1 (2018) 
• “Deep Pleasure,” “Life Inside the Clock” Boston Review (2018) 
• “Black Objector in the Soldiers’ Chapel” Southern Humanities Review (2018)
• “The Broken Man’s Permission” Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day series (2018)
• “The Great Dismal Swamp,” “St. Who,” “To Whom—to What—Do I Belong” featured in Tupelo Quarterly, introduced by Cassandra Cleghorn (2018) 
• “Can Poetry be Translated?” Interview on All Things Considered, National Public Radio (2018)
• “International Blacknesses” Asymptote Podcast interview with Layla Benítez-James (2018) 
• “‘You Don’t Get to Fall in Love and Not Be Vulnerable’: A Conversation with Jericho Brown” The Spectacle (2018) 
• “Negro Reverend of an All-White Church, Pennsylvania 1941” The Missouri Review, Poem of the Week (2019) 
• “A Fire She Loved,” “My Big Brother, Oblivion,” and “American Football” On the Seawall (2019) 
• “I Found Kin in a Thrift Store Photograph” featured on former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poetry podcast The Slowdown (2020) 
• “Another Strange Land: Downpour off Cape Hatteras (March, 1864)” Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day series, selected by Dana Levin (2020)
• “Of Walking In,” “Draft Night: Nautical Brothas Association,” “I Could Always Just Hear Somebody Running,” “Sunday” Chicago Quarterly Review, Special Issue: Anthology of Black Literature ed. by Charles Johnson (2021) 
• “The Bright River We Keep,” “The idea of water” Four Way Review (2021) 
• “Kéloїde” Under a Warm Green Linden (2021)
• "The Forest's Edge (Summer, 1864)" wildness (2022)
• “Ruin in the Era of Rain,” “The Mapmaker Scouts a Border” Columbia Journal (2023)
• “Stained Glass Speaks” ERGON: Greek/American and Diaspora Arts & Letters (2023)
• “South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills” Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day series, selected by Diane Seuss (2023)
• "The Flag Eater" The Rumpus (2023)
• "Oh you think you bad, huh?," "Two Links in a June Chain," "Before I Let Go," The Missouri Review (2023)
• "Wherein I Am: Highlights from the Aaron Coleman Papers," Julian Edison Dept. of Special Collections, Washington University in Saint Louis (2023)
• "'the earth is a living thing'," "Cough," Jet Fuel Review (2023)
• "The Aconcagua," "The Clouds," "KKK," "The North Star," "The Ursa Major," translated from The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, The Academy of American Poets (2023)
• "i. Figures One through Two" World Literature Today (2024)
• "Nicolás Guillén: Maker and Breaker of Forms" Special Folio featured in Poetry Magazine (2024)
• “Multiplicities of Blackness: Translating the Radical Authority of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo” Michigan Quarterly Review (2024)

photo credit: Marcus Jackson