Aaron Coleman 
In his debut collection, Aaron Coleman writes an American anthem for the 21st century, a full-throated lyric composed of pain, faith, lust and vulnerability. Coleman’s poems comment on and interrogate the meaning of home and identity for a black man in America, past and present. Guided by a belief system comprising an eclectic array of invented saints—Trigger, Seduction, Doubt and Who—Coleman’s quest finds answers in the natural world where “the trees teach me how to break and keep on living.”
Aaron is the author of “St. Trigger” and winner of the 2015 Button Poetry Prize. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, he received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in their Comparative Literature PhD program.