Kellogg Writers Series- Bernardo Wade

Bio: 

Born & raised in New Orleans, Bernardo Wade tries at poems, catches elbows on the court, wanders around the Bay—occasionally on Stanford’s campus as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Previously the Editor of Indiana Review, he now serves as Assistant Editor and Poetry Editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.  & though he’s published in a bunch of literary journals no one in his family has ever heard of, they remain proud of him, especially when they are featured in the poems. His first full-length poetry collection, A Love Tap, was recently published from Lookout Books of UNC-Wilmington. He’s infatuated with Ed Roberson’s question, “Can you O.D. on life?” Awarded the 2021 Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize, the 2023 Third Coast Poetry Prize, & the Academy of American Poet’s Vera Strube Poetry Prize, he has words in The Nation, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, Ecotone, & elsewhere.

A Love Tap Book Description:

Silver Winner: Foreword INDIE in Poetry

Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap—introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gay—reckons with complexities of racial identity, masculinity, recovery, and spirituality, revealing the narrative and psychic evolution of a poet who has found himself in the language.

“Thing about a love tap is that it hurts. But it’s also a kind of gentleness. Pain inflicted, but also pain withheld. A pulled punch. A mercy. It shows us how and where we are soft, vulnerable—even mortal. Such is the case with Bernardo Wade’s bruising debut. A Love Tap is the book I didn’t know I was waiting for. And Wade is the poet I didn’t know I needed.”

—John Murillo, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

“One of the pleasures of Wade’s poems is that they shirk neither humor nor swagger nor play nor a little not-quite-subtle shit talk. These poems, even when they’re hurting, enjoy themselves. They flash a smile at you time to time. They’re stylish. They’re interested in the tilt of their cap, the cuff of their jeans; not only what the words mean, but how they lean, how they sound. They want to be pretty on their way to being beautiful. On their way to being true. Even as they confront and reconcile with a former self, or come to terms with, or understand, or forgive even, and mourn.”

—Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights, from the Foreword

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