TELLING STORIES, DEMOLISHING MARGINS

Award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural strategist Aurielle Marie (they/she) is a Black queer storyteller, a political organizer, and child of the Deep South by way of Atlanta. They received their Bachelor’s in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from the Evergreen State College.

Co-founder of the grassroots community-led political coalition It’s Bigger Than You, and strong cultural strategist for organizations on the frontlines of abolition, demilitarization, and anti-racism/anti-policing efforts, she is also a powerful public speaker, facilitator, and multi-modal 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, a 2016 Roddenberry Fellowship Finalist, and a current fellow of the Freedomways Reporting Project. 

She’s been featured as a political pundit on many notable news broadcasts, including CNN’s Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, Fox SOUL’s Tammy Mac Show, and the Blossom TV network. In 2018, Aurielle created #ElleofTwoCities, a web series produced by Blossom Television that brought progressive perspectives to pop-cultural trending topics, emerging stories, and cultural matters. The series became a multimedia teaching tool for students pursuing secondary education with a focus on race and gender studies. 

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As an essayist, Aurielle explores subjects of justice, Blackness, bodies, sex, and pop culture in an urgent and lyrical voice, from a Black feminist lens. She has bylines in The Guardian, Bitch Media, Allure Magazine, Essence, Wear Your Voice, NBC, and Teen Vogue. From July 2020 to July 2022 she was the author of On Solidarity, a popular political essay column for writers and journals hosted by The Offing Magazine. They served in the 2021 cohort of PressOn Media’s Freedomways Reporting Residency and is in a creative curatorial stewardship with Lead to Life through 2022. 

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. She’s the Lambda Literary 2019 Poetry Emerging Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award for Poetry. Aurielle’s poetry debut, Gumbo Ya Ya is the 2020 winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

In 2022, Gumbo Ya Ya was awarded the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry and Aurielle Marie was chosen as Georgia Author of the Year for poetry. She currently lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia with her wife, Zoë and her dog, Lil’ Baldwin.