Harryette Mullen, a California resident, was born in Alabama and grew up in Texas. Her recent books are Regaining Unconsciousness (Graywolf, 2025), Her Silver-Tongued Companion (Edinburgh University, 2024), and Open Leaves/poems from earth (Black Sunflowers, 2023). Others include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be (University of Alabama, 2012) received an Elizabeth Agee Award. Graywolf Press published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary in 2013. Her poems, short stories, and essays are reprinted in over one hundred anthologies, including several published by Norton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin. Her work appears in Best of Callaloo and was selected six times for Best American Poetry. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fleck Fellowship from Banff Centre for the Arts, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2024 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2023 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Hungarian, Kyrgyz, and Vietnamese. She teaches American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA.