WHO / WHAT / WHEN / WHERE / WHY

Josh Tvrdy is a poet from Tucson, Arizona. A winner of a 2021 Pushcart Prize, he recently graduated with an MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University, where he received the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. He won Gulf Coast's 2018 Prize in Poetry, and he was a fellow at the 2017 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. His work can be found in (or is forthcoming from) POETRY,  The New England Review, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. 

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Josh's poems reside at the prickly intersection of queerness and fundamentalist Christianity; of playfulness and seriousness; of desire and shame. His speakers (haunted by religion), are skeptical of love, even as they ache towards it.

 

He likes to consider his poems as goofy dancing bodies. The sort of dance you do alone, in the safety of your apartment, privately practicing boldness. Flashing arms, liquid hips. And his speakers are edging, hesitantly but resolutely, into the bright shadows: where love and lust meet, where shame crumbles into shimmying.