Kira Tucker

Kira Tucker (she/they) is a poet and visual artist from Memphis, Tennessee. Kira is an MFA+MA candidate in Creative Writing and English at Northwestern University (graduating Summer 2023), where she specializes in writing and teaching poetry. This past December, Kira completed her Master of Arts thesis in English, titled “I Can Live Again: An Ecopoetic Meditation,” in which she examines the environmentally-rooted poetry of 20th and 21st-century Black American authors.

Featured in Tupelo Quarterly, The Spectacle, Tyger Quarterly, and elsewhere, Kira's work has earned her fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Tin House, and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. Assistant Managing Editor for TriQuarterly and a writing tutor for incarcerated students in the Northwestern Prison Education Program, Kira is working on her latest creative project all about dreams and dreaming—a poetic investigation and hopeful debut book collection spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of our collective unconscious.

In their creative engagement with nature, Kira is especially committed to exhuming and homaging the everliving histories of the lands we inhabit. For personal restoration, they love taking walks along Lake Michigan in the summer sun, cultivating an indoor forest of beloved houseplants, and trying new vegetarian recipes.