Aria Aber
German-American poet (born 1991)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aria Aber (born 1991)[1] is a German-born poet and writer based in the United States.
Aria Aber | |
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Aber in 2020 | |
| Born | 1991 (age 34–35) Münster, Germany |
| Occupation |
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| Education | |
| Spouse | Noah Warren |
| Website | |
| www | |
Early life and education
Aber was born and raised in Münster,[2] Germany, to Afghan refugees.[3] Aber moved to London in 2011 and graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English literature. She later completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry at New York University.[1]
Career
Aber's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Kenyon Review.
Aber has received awards and fellowships from Kundiman,[4] the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing,[5] and the Whiting Foundation.[6] Aber was the spring 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College.[7] She was formerly a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.[8]
Aber is a faculty member of the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of Creative Writing and resides between Vermont and Brooklyn.[9]
Hard Damage
Aber's first full-length collection, Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was published in September 2019 by University of Nebraska Press.[10]
In a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Claire Schwartz wrote, "Hard Damage—which elaborates a constellation of beauty and terror between Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States—is vexed by the meanings of bringing across."[11]
In an interview at The Yale Review, Aber has stated, "Especially the English language is political, because it has operated as a colonizing force in many places around the world, and changed global indigenous languages forever, if not completely eradicated them. If poetry is 'the soul of a nation' (this quote is attributed to T.S. Eliot, though I cannot fact-check the source), and our nation is an empire actively participating in displacement and warfare, it feels only natural to me that these topics surface in poetry."[3]
Good Girl
Aber's debut novel Good Girl was published by Hogarth in 2025. The novel follows a young German-Afghan woman in Berlin's party scene.[12][13][14][15][16] It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction[17] and the inaugural New Adult Book Prize.[18]
Personal life
Aber is married to Canadian-American writer Noah Warren; their wedding was officiated by Louise Glück, who was one of Aber's teachers at the Stegner Fellowship.[19][20]
Selected works
Poetry
- Hard Damage (2019)[21]