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Sign up todaySugar Work
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Learn moreSugar Work chronicles the complexities of womanhood, race, and gender that arose from growing up around sex work in Atlanta, Georgia in the late 1990s. Poems investigate beauty and whiteness, the aftermath of sexual trauma on the female body, divorce, desire, and art itself.
Katie Marya is a writer and translator originally from Atlanta, GA. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Guernica, Waxwing, and other literary magazines. She was the recipient of the 2018 James Dickey Prize for Poetry at Five Points and has received fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Nebraska Arts Council. Her first full-length poetry collection Sugar Work was the Editor's Choice for the 2020 Alice James Award and will be published in June 2022. She earned a BA in Spanish from Westmont College and an MFA from Bennington College. She is currently a PhD student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Katie Marya is a writer and translator originally from Atlanta, GA. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Guernica, Waxwing, and other literary magazines. She was the recipient of the 2018 James Dickey Prize for Poetry at Five Points and has received fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Nebraska Arts Council. Her first full-length poetry collection Sugar Work was the Editor's Choice for the 2020 Alice James Award and will be published in June 2022. She earned a BA in Spanish from Westmont College and an MFA from Bennington College. She is currently a PhD student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Reviews
The 2020 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice
Longlisted for the 2022 Julie Suk Award
Featured in Poets & Writers Magazine's “Page One”
Recommended by The New York Times
“Marya's debut lands in the gorgeous, messy place where the sacred and profane overlap. Sugar Work has a compelling narrative bent and generous eyes, stunning in its southern reality and recognition of suffering and work. Marya is a psychologically astute poet, a bright new talent in touch with her own humanity and that of others—allowing strippers dignity on stage, and looking upon addicts and her own young self with nuance and compassion.”
—Megan Mayhew Bergman
"There’s something about Katie Marya’s writing in Sugar Work that takes your breath away."
—Jordan Zachary, Southern Review of Books
“Whitman’s image of the crescent moon ‘carry[ing] its own full mother in its belly’ could describe the creative labor in Katie Marya’s debut collection. In Sugar Work, Marya captures the child’s awe while carrying the mother as myth and memory. It’s work, but sweet, the way any blues is sweet. As the child becomes an adult, her mother—imago now—weighs differently on the mind. These poems have a captivating intensity of beauty and care.”
—Gregory Pardlo