Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she is currently a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard where she studies modern and contemporary poetry, Black poetry and poetics, and post-WWII Black literature. She is the recipient of the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, and has received additional fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, VQR, Ploughshares, and Doek! Her debut collection, Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, was published in 2023 by Copper Canyon Press.
Selected Poems
Poetry “Araminta” and “Mystic
Missouri Review “Dream I and II” and 3 Elegies
VQR “Diagnostic I, II, and IV,” “Dream III and IV”
Doek! “Measure,” “Diagnostic III,” and “Elegy at 2 am”
Narrative Magazine “Prayer,” “Baker,” “Return,” “Tyrant,” and “Kaleidoscope”
Switchyard “Good” and “Growth”
Colorado Review “To Kati Who Doesn’t Remember”
Poetry Northwest “hystersisters.com”
The Baffler “Notes on a Dream of Dying”
Features & Reviews
Poets and Writers Magazine: “Performing the Future: Our Nineteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” (with India Lena González)
Poetry Unbound: Pádraig Ó Tuama on “Ordinary Sugar”
Poetry Foundation: Cindy Juyoung Ok on Things I Didn’t Do With This Body
32 Poems Online: “Emerging Poet Feature” (with Sarah Rose Nordgren)
Mentor & Muse: “How Do You Know It’s the End? A Roundtable on Poetic Closure” (with D.S. Waldman)