C. Derick Varn

I am a poet who works in a mixture of forms with way place and hybridity of identities shape and limits us in an increasingly globalized world. My first collection, APOCALYPTICS, is available for Unlikely Books. I have spent most of the last decade outside of the US: first in South Korea, then Northern Mexico, and then Egypt.
I have traveled over Turkey, Taiwan, parts of Japan, and Central America, and each has affected my poetic works in flora, fauna, and form. While the American South with its landscape and complicated and deeply oppressive history are often a backdrop to my poetry, the dialectical tensions between hope and darkness of our past as both individuals and as aggregate identities (racial, ethnic, multi-ethnic, regional, religious) inform my work. I currently edit for the journal, Former People, and podcast and edit for the non-fiction publisher Zero Books.