Saretta Morgan
“I don’t write anything that moves me away from that feeling of softness. If I can’t say what I need to say in language that preserves the warmth and generosity of spirit I feel when sharing who I am with someone I love, then I don’t say it at all. At least not that day.”
“The scale of intimacy Morgan lays forth in the pages of Alt-Nature broach timelines of militarism, genocide, and all that nature has archived in resistance to imperialism.”
“What is love set against and within austerity? Not the sudden lushness of oasis, but a discipline. Saretta Morgan’s keen-whetted Alt-Nature traces intimacies through severe stations—the military, border deserts, the Anthropocene—and finds/maps there the alterity of Black thought and life, which is to say, disciplines sharpened in harsh space-time. As I read and re-read Morgan’s forceful collection, I find looseness and humor in nevertheless taut syntax, unease in certainty, shade in her generosity. This is etho-poetry as much as ecopoetry, an exacting meditation on what it is to cultivate freedom in “emotional fields of decay.” Alt-Nature is utterly gorgeous and, for readers committed to the labor of loving hard despite precarity and scarcity, utterly necessary.”
“Morgan skillfully weaves together landscapes, nuanced reflections on Black and queer identity, and social and ecological commentary in these stirring pages.”
“Saretta Morgan presents ambidextrous poems that palpate the edges of many different borders.”
“In this text, the language of theory takes on the character
of a metaphysics.”
“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.”
Drawing from over a decade at the intersections of veteran anti-war organizing, grassroots humanitarian aid, Black community healing initiatives, incarceration, and Indigenous-led water protection, Saretta Morgan engages ecologies and forms of connectivity that develop alongside processes of U.S. militarization.
She is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). Working across disciplines, she has produced interactive multimedia experiences in public and private settings using engagement with texts to catalyze explorations of physical space and social connection.
Pedagogically, she takes a values-centered approach to the process of creative writing, drawing attention to how languages emerge through the practice of intentional living. She brings curiosity to the ways imagination, intuition, and personal landscapes (historic, ecological, geographic, social, emotional ...) intersect to form unique poetics in language and otherwise.
In an interview with TC Tolbert for the blog, Poet’s Corner, Tolbert asked at what point in the writing process she considers the reader:“That’s a hard one for me to answer. I'm not sure when. Lately I think about the range of Black women who I love and imagine them all into one room. I ask myself what I have to do to bring everyone into the conversation. It's a kind of proxy to see how many corners of myself I'm speaking from.”
Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she is a daughter of the South (east & west). She lives on Muscogee lands in Atlanta, where she trains in Capoeira and wild bird rehabilitation.
As a practice, she no longer uses her bio to validate cultural arms of the carceral state. However, contractually: She is the 2025-2026 Black Mountain Institute-Kluge Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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(c) Shaunté Glover
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