Kiely Sweatt is an American poet, writer, facilitator, and social artist whose literary work moves through short forms, erotic language, memory, dislocation, intimacy, performance, and collaborative literary communities. Her poetry developed across the United States and Barcelona, where she founded Prostíbulo Poético and helped build multilingual reading and translation projects.
origin of
origin of gathers poems shaped by discontinuity, bodily imagery, memory, homesickness, and rapid changes of perspective. The collection moves through fragments, short lyric units, prose passages, and shifting forms. Its language often creates meaning through juxtaposition, allowing emotional and narrative connections to appear suddenly between separated images.
Short forms and compressed attention
Sweatt has described herself as especially drawn to short prose and poetry. Compression suits a writing practice built from observation, quick tonal turns, intimate address, and details gathered from daily life. A brief poem can hold an encounter, image, or emotional disturbance with the concentrated force of a scene.
Pornography
The chapbook Pornography, published by dancing girl press, brings memory, desire, sexuality, and the unstable stories people tell about intimacy into compact lyric form. The poems often treat erotic experience as a field of recollection and invention, where tenderness and self-mythology can occupy the same moment.
Prostíbulo Poético
After moving to Barcelona, Sweatt founded Prostíbulo Poético, an international chapter of the Poetry Brothel model. The project placed original poetry inside intimate live performance, giving writers personas and creating close encounters between poets and listeners. Performance became a way to rethink how poetry can circulate socially outside conventional readings.
Translation and multilingual literary life
Sweatt also participated in multilingual reading and translation projects connecting writers across Barcelona, New York, and other cities. Her work with Tri Lengua and collaborative translation initiatives extended her interest in literary community across languages, making exchange and translation part of the same social practice as writing and performance.
Poetry community and social art
Much of Sweatt’s broader creative work has involved designing situations in which people write, listen, perform, translate, and collaborate. This social dimension gives her poetry another context: a poem can function as a private text, a spoken event, a performance, or the beginning of a temporary community.
Where to read Kiely Sweatt
The Poetry Society of New York records Sweatt’s role in founding Prostíbulo Poético in Barcelona. Barcelona Metropolitan presents an extended interview about her poetry and performance practice, while dancing girl press presents her chapbook Pornography. Readers can continue with contemporary poets, modern poetry, and poetic forms.