Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017).
Her work engages the ecologies and forms of connectivity that manifest in the shadows of militarization, incarceration, and U.S. imperialism.
She is a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists awardee, and has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
From 2018-2023 she lived between Mojave and Akimel O'odham lands in the Arizona desert, where she organized with the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix. Over the past decade she has worked with a range of grassroots organizations, including Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro, #StopLine3, Mariposas Sin Fronteras, About Face: Veterans Against the War, and Veterans for Peace NYC.
Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she currently lives on Mvskoke lands in Atlanta, GA. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LAND BACK for Indigenous peoples across the earth.
BOOKS
Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024)
“Alt-Nature feels like a search party for the haunted, the story of a collective body, a nomenclature of ache, a watery prism of queer love and kinship for the irreducibility of belonging through the geographic (and seismic) shifts and social calibration that toggles between the intimate and the structural.” - Raquel Gutiérrez
Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), chapbook
“In this text, the language of theory takes on the character
of a metaphysics.” - Douglas Kearney
room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017), chapbook
“If I sound a little abstract or obtuse talking about Room for a Counter Interior, it’s only because I don’t think I can really enter its pages with anything other than an aspiration to re-learn.” - John Rufo
SOME PUBLICATIONS
Having facilitated seminars and workshops across a variety of communities–from high school groups to anti-war veterans to undergraduate and graduate classes and literary festivals– Saretta brings curiosity and attention to the ways imagination and one’s personal landscape (historic, ecological, geographic, social, emotional) intersect to express unique poetics in language and otherwise.
She has over a decade of experience curating and hosting literary events and interactive multimedia public programs for diverse audiences including Dia Beacon, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Arizona State University’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Carnegie Museum of Art, MoCA Tucson, and as a previous series editor for the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist collective publishing initiative based in Brooklyn, NY.
For editorial support or writing projects, click the link below. For speaking inquiries, please contact Leslie Shipman: Leslie@theshipmanagency.com.
WORK WITH ME
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“Saretta and Bekezela's workshop reminded me that we can't care for one another without caring for ourselves, and I can't believe Black Lives Matter if I don't believe my own life does."
Lauren Russel
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“Saretta is a clarifying, supportive force in the editing process. She offered indispensable grounding during the final stage of manuscript preparation."
Maxe Crandall
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“Saretta created a safe space for everyone to share and learn from each other.”
Ariana Benson