Emily Wolahan

California
Writing
Affiliate, 2018 - 2019
Affiliate, 2017 - 2018
Affiliate, 2016 - 2017
www.emilywolahan.com

A portrait of a person sitting on wooden stairs.

Artist Statement

I’m a poet interested in how expectations are challenged and reversed in art, history, and our personal lives. I seek forms that push back against lyric and narrative expectations perceived and imagined, generous and overbearing. Most of my writing involves a rigorous practice of looking. An exploration of the ethics of looking has become central to my outlook and current projects.

While at Headlands

At the Headlands, I am working on two projects. The first is a manuscript titled Second-generation Landscape that explores how the constant presence of disaster has changed perception and experience. Through a mixture of lyric poems and one central long poem, Second-generation Landscape explores how words convey savage change and asks how much we are prepared to learn about this and ourselves. I am also working on a collection of “wife-woman” poems and surrounding ephemera. The “wife-woman” poems portray a twentieth-century artist and what she sacrificed and earned in order to make her nature-based sculptures. The setting of the Headlands directly informs this work.

Selected Texts

Still Lifes and Landscapes, Georgia Review, Spring 2017, Winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize

Our Notes Say—, Tinderbox Journal, March 2017

When We Weary, What Art?, DIAGRAM 10.5

View Reading at a Distance: Ploi Pirapokin & Laura Mullen
Article

Reading at a Distance: Ploi Pirapokin & Laura Mullen

View Reading at a Distance: Ari Banias, Vincent Chu, Tomas Moniz, Shelley Wong, & Hazel White
Article

Reading at a Distance: Ari Banias, Vincent Chu, Tomas Moniz, Shelley Wong, & Hazel White

View Reading at a Distance: tanea lunsford lynx & Mmakgosi Anita Tau
Article

Reading at a Distance: tanea lunsford lynx & Mmakgosi Anita Tau

View Reading at a Distance: Mary O’Brien & Vincent Chu
Article

Reading at a Distance: Mary O’Brien & Vincent Chu