February 22, 2026

Tatiana Johnson-Boria

Tatiana Johnson-Boria

Tatiana is the author of Nocturne in Joy, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in Poetry. She was raised in Boston, on the unceded land of the Massachusett people, and is an educator, artist, and mother. She’s received fellowships and awards from Tin House, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The MacDowell Residency, among others. 

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Tell me how you survived being a Black girl in New England. Is it the same way I survived being a Black girl in New England? Isn’t it true that Black girls can survive the unimaginable? When will others stop forcing Black girls to survive the unimaginable?

POEMS 

I love the ghazal form, but realize that ghazals often don’t work for me if I’m forcing the language into the form. The repetition needs to, for me, represent an obsession or a yearning. This poem encapsulates that yearning. I think repetition shows how this yearning can be a constant, yet can evolve over time. I also think it represents how losses never leave us.

INTERVIEW 

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