Luther Hughes
Photo credit: Grant Hindsley
Luther Hughes (they/them) is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), listed as best books of 2022 in The New Yorker, and the chapbook, Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association.
They are the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an organization for queer writers of color, and cohosts The Poet Salon Podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship and the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, they received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis.
Their writing has been published in The Paris Review, Orion, American Poetry Review, and others. They’ve been featured in The Seattle Times, Forbes, Essence, KUOW Public Radio, The Slowdown, and more. Luther lives in Seattle, where they were born and raised.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS and Interviews:
FICTION: "The Distance Between Sunrise and Sunset," Wildness
INTERVIEW: “Exploring the Black Erotic: An Interview with Luther Hughes on A Shiver in the Leaves,” Honey Literary
INTERVIEW: "Luther Hughes with Tony Leuzzi," Brooklyn Rail
POETRY: “It Is February,” Paris Review
POETRY: "Near Sacrament," Orion Magazine
POETRY: "My Mother, My Mother," Poets.org
POETRY: “Tenor,” Poetry
REVIEW: "When the Years are Gone: On Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove," Poetry Northwest
ESSAY: "On Vulnerability,” Hayden's Ferry Review
works:
A Shiver in the Leaves
Boa Editions, 2022
Touched (chapbook)
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018
Topics addressed in readings
Nature
Place, home, and belonging
Family
Blackness
Queerness and sexuality
Depression, restlessness, and interiority
Love and intimacy
Trauma, memory, and violences against the body
Hope
Sample Workshop 1: Love on the brain
Love is possibly one of the most popularized subjects that brings people to poetry. There is nothing better than reading a poem that excites the heart or that reveals something in us we thought laid dormant. How do we write a love poem? What does it mean to approach love in our writing without risking corniness? In this two-hour, generative in-person workshop, we’ll discuss and analyze poems by Donika Kelly, Ada Limón, and Aracelis Girmay, among others, and we’ll write poems in response to prompts that will motivate us to think about love and love poems differently. The goal of this workshop is to examine and challenge our ideas on what makes up a love poem.
Sample Workshop 2: Writing Your History
There are moments in our lives that shape who we are today. Sometimes it’s difficult to accurately tell this story. Our history is a part of us and at the same time, it haunts us, reminds us of those times when we were at our lowest. There are also moments in our lives that elevate us and lift us up, times that we were the happiest. In this workshop, we will read and discuss work by Vievee Francis, Li-Young Lee, Safia Elhillo, and others. With exercises and prompts, you will learn ways to take control of our stories.
TESTIMONIALS
“A Shiver of the Leaves is a book of hope, of triumph, even as each day that we wake is a triumph over how things might have been otherwise. ‘Look at all my colors,’ Hughes says, reminding us that black contains all colors, is in that way its own abundance. That abundance includes the erotic, the familial, relationships variously sought and regretted, relationships with others as much as with ourselves, the self as an ever-restless interior of light and shadow. That abundance includes, as well, the hard-won poems of A Shiver in the Leaves, whose music is finally, beautifully, brutally, Hughes’s own.”
“What distinguishes the densities of desire from the densities of pain? In A Shiver in the Leaves, Luther Hughes makes poems that richly blur across dark landscapes of eroticism and charged violence, allowing leakages between territories claimed by unsparing appetites and those claimed by the voracity of grief. Animated by a bruised, febrile lyricism, Hughes’ tensile lines plumb the embodied experience of Blackness, queerness, faith, and vexed desire with searing jolts of language and exquisite tenderness. One leaves these poems enlarged, stunned, complexly bereft: ‘Come/let’s plunge forward...grab hold the darkness we become.”
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Available for consultations:
During Winter, Spring, and Fall - Prioritizing queer writers and writers of color
Poetry Full-length Book Manuscript
Poetry Chapbook Manuscript
Individual Poems/Pages
Poetry MFA Applications
1:1 Poetry Reading Lists and Discussion
Please contact us through Luther’s website or our inquiry form