Nomi Stone
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008), Kill Class (Tupelo 2019), a finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, 2023), finalist for the Atelier Prize. She is also the co-editor of two forthcoming anthologies, with Luke Hankins, Between Paradise and Earth: Eve Poems (Orison Books, 2023), Breaking into Blossom: Poems With Amazing Endings (Texas Review Press, 2023). She won a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright, and conducted fieldwork across the Middle East and the United States. Her poems recently appear in The Atlantic, POETRY Magazine American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, and widely elsewhere.
Stone’s first collection of poems, Stranger’s Notebook explores questions of faith, ritual and belonging and is inspired by her time living in the Jewish community on the island of Djerba, Tunisia. Her second collection, Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Carolyn Forché described the book as “a rare achievement” and in The Massachusetts Review, the book was described as “part of a new generation of writers who hold American readers firmly within the scope of blame and reckoning, much as Denise Levertov did during the Vietnam War.”A section of her third collection in progress, You Could Build a World This Way, about queer family-making, was recently a finalist for the Bull City Press’s chapbook prize and a semifinalist for Beloit’s Chad Walsh Prize. Her first academic monograph, Pinelandia, political phenomenology of American empire and the Middle East in the 21st century, brings together ethnography and a field poetics. The anthropologist Lucy Suchman describes the Pinelandia as “an extraordinarily original, timely, and powerful book.” She is currently writing a double memoir with her wife fiction and non-fiction writer Rose Skelton about conceiving their son Roscoe.
Stone grew up in Washington, DC, the daughter of a Rabbi. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia, an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson, an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford, was a research associate at Princeton University and is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Published Works
Poetry
Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 2019)
Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008)
Prose
Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, 2023)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
BA Dartmouth
MPhil Oxford
MFA Warren Wilson
PhD Columbia
Post-doc Princeton