Aza
Pace
Poet. Educator. Editor.
About
Aza Pace is the author of Her Terrible Splendor, which won the 2024 Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize and is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Bayou, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere, and she is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes. Aza holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of North Texas, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of American Literary Review. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and composition.
Select Poems
“Mine” and “A Landscape Misread.” Bennington Review. (forthcoming)
“Listening In.” The Florida Review.
“Twelve Women in a Circle with Candles” and “Portrait of Nymphs Bathing.” The Southern Review and Best American Poetry "Pick of the Week."
“Listing” and “Chickadee.” The Arkansas International.
“After Reading Sappho.” The Adroit Journal.
"The Still Hours" and "How Should I Name My Friend?" Crazyhorse (now Swamp pink).
“Welcome to the Solar System, Welcome to the Woods.” Southeast Review.
“The Sorceress.” The South Carolina Review.
“Postcards.” Indianapolis Review.
“Finally, a New Gaze.” Tupelo Quarterly.
“Mimic.” Bayou Magazine.
"Sugar on My Tongue." Mudlark.
"Chapel." Poets.org. Winner of the 2021 Voertman/Academy of American Poets University Prize.
"Girls." Passages North.
"Invisible Bodies." New Ohio Review.
"My Father Asks What I'm Looking At." Poets.org Winner of the 2020 Voertman/Academy of American Poets University Prize.
“Behind the Lattice.” Copper Nickel.
"Definition in the Woods" and "Praise to the Nightjar." The Boiler.
“The Day I Meet Circe,” “Q&A with Circe,” “The Day I Met Odysseus,” “Circe Recalls the Nymph Scylla,” and “Witch in My Forest: Fragments.” Mudlark.
“In Retrospect.” The Southern Review.
Reviews & Interviews
“Bound: An Interview with Erin Ethridge and Colleen Marie Foley.” American Literary Review.
"Not Lost Anymore: A Review of Pilot by Danika Stegeman LeMay." Pleiades.
"Review: Your New Feeling is the Artifact of a Bygone Era by Chad Bennett." American Literary Review.
"How Things Mean: An Interview with Kevin Prufer." American Literary Review.
News
Voertman/Academy of American Poets Prize 2021
Kiki Petrosino has selected "Chapel" by Aza Pace as the winner of the 2021 Voertman / Academy of American Poets Prize.
Petrosino writes: "This poem finds ecstasy in the earthbound, choosing the language of leaf-light over theology's "narrow blue." I admire the finely wrought imagery & the deep intimacy of the address as we witness the body becoming a net(work), sifting & holding all there is, in this world, to love."
Voertman/Academy of American Poets Prize 2020
Kathleen Graber has selected "My Father Asks What I'm Looking At" by Aza Pace as the winner of the 2020 Voertman / Academy of American Poets Prize.
Graber writes: "My Father Asks What I'm Looking At" unfolds at the intersection of image and imagination. Advancing at the pace of a quiet evening coming on, this poem offers its readers a steadily deepening exploration into the mystery of our connection to one another and to all things."