Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen’s latest books are Regaining Unconsciousness (Graywolf, 2025), Open Leaves/poems from earth (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2023) and a critical edition of her poetry, Her Silver-Tongued Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Others include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be (University of Alabama, 2012) received an Elizabeth Agee Award. Graywolf Press published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary in 2013. Her visual art collages have appeared in About Place, Air/Light, Jet Fuel Review, and Obsidian. 

Harryette Mullen teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA. Her poems, short stories, and essays are published widely and reprinted in over one hundred anthologies, including several published by Norton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin presses. Her work appears in Best of Callaloo and was selected six times for the Best American Poetry anthology series edited by David Lehman with guest editors A.R. Ammons, Robert Hass, Terrance Hayes, Robert Pinsky, Elaine Equi, and Mary Jo Salter. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2023 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Hungarian, Kyrgyz, and Vietnamese.