Aurielle Marie

Award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural strategist Aurielle Marie (they/she) is a Black queer storyteller, political organizer, and child of the Deep South by way of Atlanta. They earned their Bachelor’s in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from Evergreen State College. Aurielle’s poetry debut, Gumbo Ya Ya, is the recipient of both the 2020 Cave Canem Prize and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, and is out now with the University of Pittsburgh Press.

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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 2022 fellow of Scalawag Magazine’s 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. Recently, she has appeared on the Jennifer Hudson Show as an author and pop-cultural person of interest.

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.

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. Their bylines include The Guardian, Bitch Media, Allure Magazine, Essence, Wear Your Voice, NBC, and Teen Vogue. From July 2020 to July 2022 she authored 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 hold an ongoing creative curatorial stewardship position with Lead to Life.

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 2019 Los Angeles Review poetry winner. She was the Lambda Literary 2019 Poetry Emerging Writer-in-Residence and won the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award for Poetry.

In 2022, they were chosen as Georgia Author of the Year for poetry following the debut of Gumbo Ya Ya. Aurielle is an Out Magazine Out100 Honoree. She currently lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia with her wife, Zoë and her dog, Lil’ Baldwin.