When Tiana Clark wrote “The First Black Bachelorette” in 2016, she knew she had created something special. The long poem exploring the speaker’s concept of beauty and race through the first Black contestant on the reality show, “The Bachelorette,” became the driving force behind Clark’s second full-length poetry collection “Scorched Earth.” Little did she know, the collection would be selected as a finalist for the National Book Award six months after its publication in 2025.
Clark received the news with a deep sense of gratitude and satisfaction, describing the achievement as a rewarding testament to her poetic skills and hard work.
“I always tell my students that your art is for you. You have to work on your internal locus of control because if you only relied on external validation, you would not last very long as an artist,” Clark said. “But, of course, it feels incredibly satisfying when that internal validation and external validation coalesce.”
Prior to “Scorched Earth,” Clark released two other works, “Equilibrium: Poems,” a chapbook she wrote while completing an M.F.A. program in 2016 and “I Cannot Talk About the Tree Without the Blood,” her first full-length collection published in 2018.
Clark developed “Scorched Earth” over several years. The work became a means of comfort through divorce, fear after the 2016 presidential election and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Survival is at the heart of this collection, along with the question of how to find joy and self-love in the midst of loss and despair.
“When you experience deep loss or deep grief, in some ways life can become difficult, but it also becomes very clear what’s important,” Clark said. “I created what I [needed] to survive.”
Mostly working in solitude, Clark experienced a newfound sense of freedom in her writing. Still, her isolation also created feelings of self-doubt and uncertainty.
“When you take risks on your own, you’re always [questioning] in your mind, does this work? Does this not work?” Clark explained. “And I have years of experience and some expertise, but each book has its own kind of universe. Its own kind of logic to unlock and finesse.”
Writing “Scorched Earth,” Clark had to learn to trust her own instincts, which makes the recognition from the National Book Award all the more gratifying.
“I tell my students to trust and chase their own imagination first, even beyond the workshop,” Clark said. “Being a finalist for the National Book Award is such a testimony to me trusting and chasing my own imagination, and practicing what I preach.”
Clark has taught the Advanced Poetry Writing workshop at Smith since she became the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence in 2021. She describes this experience as deeply influential to her own writing.
“Each semester, I’m reacquainting myself with the key components of poetry,” Clark explained. “And it’s happened before where I’m giving my students writing prompts, and (it) will slip into my psyche and my work.”
She credits her students with helping her grow and deepen her relationship with poetry.
“[My students] are so smart, and I learn from them all the time,” said Clark. “I feel like they’re my teachers as well. I feel like I’m a co-student with them and we’re learning and reckoning with poetry together.”
With “Scorched Earth” garnering recognition, Clark has turned her attention to her current work-in-progress, an essay collection titled “Begging to be Saved.” This opportunity first arose in 2019 when her Buzzfeed essay “This Is What Black Burnout Feels Like” went viral and agents began to reach out with book deals. However, Clark decided to take her time with the project.
“There’s this idea in capitalism to jump on momentum. And there’s definitely some truth to that, but I personally was not ready,” she explained. “I needed more time because I really wanted to be thoughtful [about] putting a book out into the world.”
Similar to Clark’s poetry, the book will explore personal topics alongside history and politics, all of which she says are impossible to separate from each other.
“To me, the personal is political, especially as a Black poet, especially as a queer Black poet,” Clark explained.
This idea was also the theme of Clark’s book, “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.”
“That title was coming from this sense [that] I’d love to be able to just talk about a tree. But whenever I see a tree, especially in the South where I was raised, I’m always going to think about the history of lynching,” Clark said. “So just like in poetry, there’s the image, but [there’s] everything the image represents. That image is rooted in history, that image is rooted in personal experience.”
Clark explores this concept in “Scorched Earth” as well, using “Buzzard’s Roost Pass,” a photolithograph by artist Kara Walker that positions the experience of Black Americans at the center of the Civil War narrative, as the cover and inspiration for the ekphrastic poem, also titled “Scorched Earth.”
Writing “Scorched Earth” and connecting the past with the present helped Clark process personal and political challenges and now serves as guidance for how to persevere in the future.
“It’s almost as if I was writing my own survival guide for four years,” Clark explained. “And then when Trump [got] re-elected, [I had] this book that’s a testimony not only to my survival, but how to keep on surviving. And how to keep taking up space and how to not be invisible and how not to respond in fear to terror.”
“Scorched Earth” is one of five National Book Award finalists for poetry. The winner will be announced November 19.
