Duriel E. Harris is an American poet, performer, sound artist, scholar, and editor whose work moves through the body, memory, race, citizenship, music, visual form, and the social life of language. Her poems often place lyric intensity beside fragmentation, performance, documentary pressure, and sonic experiment, giving the page the energy of a score as well as a field of thought.
Drag
Drag, published in 2003, introduced a multivocal poetic practice shaped by performance, sexuality, race, music, and formal disruption. Voices accumulate, interrupt one another, and change register. The collection established Harris’s interest in the body as a site of social inscription and expressive resistance.
Amnesiac: Poems
Amnesiac: Poems, published in 2010, deepens Harris’s engagement with memory, trauma, history, and fractured consciousness. The poems use gaps, repetitions, shifting voices, and unstable surfaces to register the difficulty of recovering experience. Memory becomes an embodied process shaped by language, silence, and cultural pressure.
No Dictionary of a Living Tongue
No Dictionary of a Living Tongue, published by Nightboat Books in 2017, brings prose, lyric, epigram, dialogue, song, visual notation, and dictionary-like structures into a deliberately heterogeneous book. Citizenship, gender, race, media, violence, desire, and bodily knowledge move through forms that keep changing as the poems proceed. The collection was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award.
Body, sound, and performance
Harris’s practice extends beyond the printed page through performance and sound art. Voice can operate as language, music, breath, rhythm, interruption, and physical presence. This attention to sound changes the architecture of the poems themselves: spacing, repetition, typography, and broken syntax often carry performative force.
Language, citizenship, and public life
Harris repeatedly examines the vocabularies through which bodies are named, governed, remembered, and made public. Her poems draw energy from political speech, anatomy, popular culture, inherited literary forms, and intimate address. In this work, citizenship becomes a lived linguistic condition involving belonging, exposure, history, and the right to speak.
Obsidian and editorial work
Harris is editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. The journal’s attention to Black writing, art, experimentation, and diaspora places her editorial practice in direct conversation with the questions that animate her poetry. Her literary work also includes teaching poetry, poetics, and African American literature at Illinois State University.
Recognition and literary community
Harris received the AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2023 and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry in 2024. These honors recognize both the force of her writing and her sustained work within literary institutions and communities.
Where to read Duriel E. Harris
The Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation provide biographical context and selected work. Nightboat Books presents No Dictionary of a Living Tongue, and Obsidian documents Harris’s editorial and artistic work. Readers can continue with contemporary poets, modern poetry, and sound in poetry.