Summary
Arianne Zwartjes is a poet, nonfiction writer, and artist. Her most recent book, These Dark Skies (University of Iowa Press, 2022), is an autopolitical work mixing personal narrative and art criticism with research on borders, militarization, migration, and constructions of race; it was longlisted for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. She is also author of the lyrical medical humanities book Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy; a selection from Detailing Trauma won the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize for Nonfiction and was named a Best American Essays Notable Essay.
Her most recent work centers in the field of autotheory, and can be found in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Michigan Quarterly Review, and in the forthcoming anthology Autotheories (MIT Press, 2025).
Her work has appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, Witness, Kenyon Review, Entropy, Catapult, The Southern Review, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere; her previous works include Disem(body), The Surfacing of Excess, and (Stitched) A Surface Opens: Essays. Zwartjes has taught writing at the University of Arizona, the United World College, Pima Community College, Santa Fe Community College, the UA Poetry Center, and Urban Word. She has also worked as a wilderness program director, an EMT, a wilderness-medicine instructor, and a carpenter. Visit her and her writing at .
Education
- MFA, University of Arizona