BIO.

Award winning poet, essayist and Freedom Fighter Aurielle Marie is a child of the Deep South and an Atlanta native. She received her bachelors in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from the Evergreen State College, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama.

Co-founder of the grassroots community-led political coalition It’s Bigger Than You, and noted cultural strategist for organizations on the frontlines of change, she is also a powerful public speaker, a facilitator, and a popular performance artist. Aurielle has received many awards for her political activism, including being named one of Creative Loafing Atlanta’s 20 People to Watch (2015), being a Kopkind Colony Journalism/Activism awardee, and a Roddenberry Fellowship Finalist. In 2018, Aurielle was the creator of #ElleofTwoCities, an online web series produced by Blossom Television that brought a social justice perspective to trending topics. The series became a multi-media teaching tool for students pursuing secondary education. She’s been featured as a political pundit on many notable news broadcasts, including CNN’s NewsRoom with Brooke Baldwin.

Aurielle’s poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in the TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Black Warrior, BOAAT Journal, Sycamore Review, Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Palette Poetry, and Ploughshares. She's received invitations to fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA Voices, and Tin House. Aurielle is a 2017 winner of the Blue Mesa Review poetry award, and a Write Bloody Book prize. She’s the Lambda Literary 2019 Poetry Emerging Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award for Poetry.

As an essayist, Aurielle traverses subjects of justice, Blackness, bodies, sex and pop culture in a timely and urgent voice that pulls from a Black feminist lens. She has bylines in The Guardian, Bitch Media, Allure Magazine, Essence, Wear Your Voice, NBC, and Teen Vogue.

To stay updated with her work, writings and periodic rants on french press coffee, Follow her: @YesAurielle on Twitter and Instagram