Natasha Oladokun
Photo courtesy of Natasha Oladokun
Bio
Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She earned a BA in English from the University of Virginia, and an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Image, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, Catapult,and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.
Receiving a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, especially this early in my career, has rendered me nearly speechless with surprise, excitement, and deep gratitude. It’s an understatement to say the past several years of my life have been marked by immeasurable despair and loss, ushering in what I’ve long feared is an irreversible deterioration in my abilities as a poet. To be called to study language as an instrument, sword, balm, and medicine—then nearly lose my faith in language entirely to grief—is a bitter irony that would almost be funny if it weren’t so entombing. And yet. Louder than bells, here come these astounding moments that arrive out of the ether, these unexpected reminders that joy comes in the morning, and that the work of poetry is not only for me. To receive the recognition and financial support of this award is not just an honor. For me, it’s a concrete and meaningful gesture of encouragement to stay the course, remain unflinchingly fierce, and honor the path cleared by Black poets, queer poets, faithful poets that came before me. This year, I intend to do all of that with renewed fearlessness and passion. And I’ll keep carving my own path, too.