Anaïs Duplan

Award-winning Poet & Essayist
2022 Whiting Award-winner

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • Outside the Box: Anaïs Duplan on Lubaina Himid
  • Poetics of Emotional Research
  • An Evening with Anaïs Duplan

Biography

“This is futuristic work ― work that doesn’t just serve as a reminder that there will be black people in the future, but work that mines for an understanding of what that future will look like. In form, in shape, in language, and in endless vision.” —Hanif Abdurraqib

“Here are poems that revel in post-hybridity and borderless threnodies, and go straight to the stillness of the heart, to performances of language that are fierce and juicier than a papaya, and frankly, that one would only expect from a brilliant, young mind as theirs.” —Major Jackson

“Duplan skillfully models radical listening in the relationship he cultivates between the text and its audience, prompting us to reimagine our interactions with artistic tradition and our lives in language.” —Ploughshares

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the poetry collection I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), which reinvents ekphrasis as an act of devotion to art as both the sense-archive and future tense of Black embodiment; Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a collection of lyric essays that is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility; and the poetry collection Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016). He is also the author of the chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017).

About Duplan’s debut collection, Take This Stallion, Jericho Brown observed, “I have never before read a book like Anaïs Duplan’s Take This Stallion. Duplan’s major talent is recognizing the self in the other, making for poems that flow forward in a tone of oneness—is oneness a tone?—poems that make evident an ever-expanding world by opening themselves up into that world. This debut does what poets in their fifth or sixth collections are still trying to figure: it balances the intellect, image, music, and emotion in ways so unfamiliar that a blurb couldn’t possible characterize the work.”

In 2016, Duplan founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 he received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.

Duplan is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and others.

Short Bio

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the book I NEED MUSIC; Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture; Take This Stallion; and the chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. Duplan is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and others.

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