Excited to share that my poem has been selected as WINNER of the 2024 C.D Wright Poetry Prize judged by @richardsiken! Won’t you celebrate with me!!!! ✨

Was thinking today about some of the things that make me REALLY happy and I realized I really love to shower. lol. I feel a sense of otherworldly satisfaction whenever I get in there and that hot water just rains down on me—oh and if I’d just had a little weed and put on some good music, my entire world, which is usually all of the world, really, becomes wholly full of blissful goodness and many astonishing variations of deep kindness, but then, unfortunately, and quite devastatingly, too, I often remember the world is a wicked system because you and me are still such pathetic organs of greed. I think it is most majestic to tamper greed with this astonishing kindness; most sexy and most powerfully human.

So excited to share my 2024 C.D. Wright Poetry prize-winning poem! 🎊 Incredibly grateful to the team at The Arkansas International for issue 18! Such a beautiful cover (in thread), and my name on the front page alongside other phenomenal writers whom I admire!

Thank goodness for Birthright citizenship 4-1

Mobstarrsss I’m performing on the @TODAYshow on August 7th in NYC 💜

tornado music video out nowwwww go watch on youtube 💜 ayrastarr.lnk.to/tornadooffi…

Rotimi Fani-Kayode needs to be remembered. a gay Nigerian artist, exiled in the 1960s at the age of 11. I highly suggest the essay: Homoerotic African Art, in which Moyo Okediji analyses the art of Zanele Muholi & Rotimi Fani-Kayode—in the book; Western Frontiers of African Art.

Nigerian Femme Boys. For Project Celebrating Queers. 📸 by me.

Hunger

As a young writer, I always wanted to be read. Here’s me today with my translated novel in Brazil after an event in an auditorium that “quickly ran out of seats and people had to stand outside to listen” ❤️❤️❤️.

Never forget that you are the main data center. Drink water, and consume as much literature as possible.

King Charles III has announced a ban on LGBTQIA conversion therapy and classified the practice as abusive.

That’s the whole point lol, in 5 years those same children will be teenagers that only listen to Ayra Starr ! The music is cross generational , if you no like am , your children go like am. I’m gonna be here for a long time

I returned to the University of Illinois, Chicago to deliver the commencement speech for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. As an alum who earned both her Master’s and PhD there, returning in this way was surreal. 10,000 people were in that space. Hell of a milestone.

see, i was in the trenches