Yona Harvey

Yona Harvey is the author of the poetry collections You Don’t Have To Go To Mars for Love (Four Way Books, 2020) and Hemming the Water (Four Way Books, 2013), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda and coauthored, with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther and the Crew.

Harvey is also the recipient of the inaugural Lucille Clifton Legacy Award in poetry from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship

Harvey has worked with teenagers, writing about their mental health issues in collaboration with Creative Nonfiction magazine. She was an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she cofounded the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) with Terrance Hayes and Dawn Lundy Martin. She is currently the Tammis Day Professor of Poetry in the department of English language and literature at Smith College. Harvey lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.