Harryette Mullen is a poet and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and African American literature. Her collections of poetry include S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), Recyclopedia (2006), Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (2012), and Open Leaves (2023). Her poetry has been hailed by critics as unique, powerful, and challenging. Elisabeth A. Frost wrote in Contemporary Literature: “Crossing the lines between often isolated aesthetic camps, Harryette Mullen has pioneered her own form of bluesy, disjunctive lyric poetry, combining a concern for the
political issues raised by identity politics with a poststructuralist emphasis on language.” Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, but spent most of her childhood in Fort Worth, Texas. “I’ve loved to write from childhood. I wrote to entertain my family, my friends, and myself,” she told Emily Allen Williams in an interview for the African American Review. Mullen began writing poetry more seriously in high school, when she had her first poem published in a local newspaper. After earning her BA from the University of Texas in Austin, she earned a PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation
on slave narratives.
HER POEM ELLIPTICAL IS PRETTY FAMOUS NOW. I attached it!! Jill
