An Interview with Tracy Faud
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18422/78-2734Abstract
Tracy Fuad is a formally inventive American poet whose work consistently probes the convergence of identity, technology, diaspora, and language. Born in March 1989 (the same month, as she has noted, as the internet) she grew up in suburban Minnesota, the daughter of a Kurdish-Iraqi father whose family had left Iraq in 1974. She is the author of two collections of poetry: about:blank (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Claudia Rankine, and PORTAL (University of Chicago Press, 2024), winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poets Prize. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and the Berlin Senate Fund. She lives in Berlin, where she has been based since 2020, and teaches poetry at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.
In this conversation, conducted in Berlin in early 2026, we discussed the poetics of blankness and belonging, the relationship between digital and diasporic fragmentation, what it means to arrive in a new language, and the formal transformations between her two books.
Author Biographies
Tracy Fuad
Tracy Fuad is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poetry, PORTAL, won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Prize and was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere, and have been translated into German, Kurdish, Turkish and Spanish. She lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel. 
photo credit ©Michael Fuad
Brian David Crawford
Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Brian David Crawford is a poet and educator based in Berlin. He studied literature at Brandeis University and the University of California at Irvine, and has taught literature and writing in the United States and Germany. He is currently Guest Professor at the Georg August Universität in Göttingen. His poetry has received support from the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School in Belfast; his poems are forthcoming in Gulf Coast and The New Ohio Review, and have appeared in The New American Studies Journal. He is guest editor of this special issue of the New American Studies Journal on North American poets in Berlin.
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