Poet Ari Banias has lived and worked around the country, but in 2023, he moved to the Valley — and earlier this year, he got a special accolade to honor his poetry talents and further deepen his connection to his new home.
Banias was selected as the eleventh Northampton Poet Laureate, succeeding Franny Choi. His term began on Tuesday, Feb. 10 and will continue through Thursday, Feb. 10, 2028.
The Poet Laureate’s role is to promote poetry in the local community by hosting public readings and other poetry-focused community events.
“I think of poems as teachers,” Banias said in an email. “When I spend time writing, reading and being with poems, they can teach forms of care and attention that are crucial for staying alive together.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Ari as our new Poet Laureate,” said Brian Foote, executive director of the Northampton Arts Council, in a press release. “His voice and vision will be instrumental in continuing our city’s long-standing tradition of celebrating poetry as a vital part of our civic life.”
Banias is the author of the poetry collections “A Symmetry,” which won the Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature in 2022, and “Anybody,” which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His works have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, and The Yale Review, among other publications. He’s also received fellowships from MacDowell, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wallace Stegner Program, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Headlands Center for the Arts.
“His work, I think, is going to appeal to a lot of people, whether they already have a history with poetry or whether they’re coming to it new,” said Kelsey Socha-Bishop, who was part of the subcommittee responsible for choosing the poet laureate. “It’s very evocative, and it’s great, regardless of what you’re bringing to it.”
When Banias learned that he was chosen as the new Northampton Poet Laureate, it was “a total surprise,” he said, and a real honor.
“I feel excited for being able to bring some ideas into fruition that I have, and it seems like a really nice opportunity to be in a different sort of relation to the community — not just in Northampton, but greater western Mass, too,” he said.
Banias was born in California, but he spent most of his childhood in a suburb of Chicago. He spent much of his adult life living in either California or New York, but he moved to Northampton in 2023, drawn to the queer and leftist community and because he wanted to be around friends, family, and other creatives who lived in the area, as well as “the bountiful agriculture,” he said.
Outside of his work as a poet and a poetry teacher — at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — Banias has worked in independent bookselling for more than two decades.
“It’s something I keep returning to,” he said. “I love the community aspect of it.” Over the past twenty years, he’s had to hear a number of “these scary predictions that come out where it’s like, ‘Bookstores are dead, and people want to read on their Kindles!’ and actually, no. People want bookstores.”
Banias said that his inspirations include “my immediate surroundings, the beautiful strangeness of other artists’ and writers’ minds and the things they make, other people’s courage and vulnerability, overlooked details, the more-than-human creatures and beings that live alongside us, translation, experiment and play, my relationship to Greece (my familial country of origin), a drive to say the thing I can’t say but need to say, a drive to say the thing I don’t yet know, basically, [and] trying to wrangle language to get at truths that are shimmering just outside or beyond conscious articulation.”
By the end of his term, he said he wants to have “expanded people’s experience of and exposure to poetry — including where we typically expect to find poetry, and what we anticipate from it in advance.”
“These preconceptions or expectations can be a kind of closing-off,” he said. “By expanding, I mean everything from the kinds of poetry we expect to hear or read, to ideas about what counts as a poem, to how we presume a poem is created or “should” behave or “should be” experienced. I think there’s so much exciting, potentially liberating room for play, strangeness, challenge, unruliness, and connection that poetry can initiate within us and between us.”
For more information about Ari Banias, visit aribanias.com.
