Past Resident

Steve Bellin-Oka

Poet, translator, and sound/multimedia artist Steve Bellin-Oka is the author of two chapbooks, O Frankenstein and Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station. His forthcoming book, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, won the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize from the University of North Texas Press. His current projects include a translation of Vereda del Norte by the Mexican novelist José U. Escobar, Tell Me Exactly What You Saw and What You Think It Means, a new book of poems based on films, and Provisional: The United States and Queer Immigration, a collaborative multimedia project with the visual artist Kristen Tomecek. Originally from Baltimore and educated in Virginia and Mississippi, Steve has lived all over North America. He is a 2019-2020 Tulsa Artists Fellow and has also received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the National Parks Arts Foundation.

“Jean-Michel Basquiat said that art is how we decorate space and music how we decorate time. I think a poet decorates both space and time—the first by the arrangement of words on a page and the second by those words unfolding rhythmically through phrasing and cadence. Through that process, poets allow us to get in touch with the truth of complex emotions that are not easily named but are universal. For queer poets like myself, poetry is also always a political act because it makes concrete experiences of ourselves in a world that marginalizes and compartmentalizes us. Only by speaking the truth about ourselves can we ever be fully human.”

Twitter: @SteveBellinOka