Rae Paris

Rae Paris is from Carson, California with roots extending to New Orleans. Her work has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, and residencies from the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Hambidge Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). Her poem "The Forgetting Tree" was selected as Best of the Net 2013. Her book The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory (Wayne State University Press, 2017) remembers her father’s life and death within an assemblage of past and present racial violence and resistance to terror in the United States. Carolyn Forché calls The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory “harrowing and elegiac,” and Tracy K. Smith says, “The Forgetting Tree punctures our national reticence around slavery, and offers a measure of necessary healing.” She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington.

2018 Events
Black Space: A Reading with Black Poets