JOSHUA AIKEN
Photo credit: Marcus Jackson
Joshua Aiken is a poet, policy advocate, and black studies scholar focused on the history of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and the rule of law in the context of U.S. settler empire. A Cave Canem Fellow, de Groot Foundation grantee, and Vermont Studio Center resident, Joshua’s poetry collection, to be in & of won the 2023 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize as selected by poet Chen Chen. Joshua is the recipient of the Steven Esposito Scholarship from the Point Foundation as a J.D./Ph.D. Candidate in History and African-American Studies at Yale University. His dissertation, prospectively titled The Armed Individual, examines the relationship between racial hierarchy, gun laws, and distributions of harm in the U.S. since Reconstruction.
Joshua holds graduate degrees in Forced Migration Studies and U.S. History from the University of Oxford where his research focused on race, political economy, displacement, and state-sponsored violence in the Americas in the 20th century. He was the Researcher-in-Residence for Artspace New Haven’s 2020 exhibition on the local chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. His writing and poetry can be found in publications like Apogee Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Copper Nickel, Sixth Finch, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and the Winter Tangerine Review. He currently teaches a course on poetics and citizenship through the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
to be in & of
Winner of the 2022 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize, his debut chapbook to be in & of was released in August 2023.
The chapbook is available for purchase from: Bookshop (support independent bookstores!), Possible Futures (Josh’s favorite New Haven independent bookspace!), Barnes & Nobles, and Amazon.
For more chapbook release details: visit www.inandofchapbook.com
JOSHUA AIKEN 