Poet Laureate
Ari Banias
Poet Laureate of Northampton 2026-2028
Ari Banias is the author of two full length poetry collections, A Symmetry (W. W. Norton, 2021), which won the 2022 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody (2016), which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wallace Stegner Program, The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Ari’s poems have appeared in Triple Canopy, The Nation, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, Georgia Review, Washington Square, The Yale Review, and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, among others. He has taught graduate and undergraduate poetry in numerous venues, most recently as a visiting assistant professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Spring 2025. In addition to teaching, he has worked in independent bookselling for nearly two decades.