Athena Melliar
twitter: @AthenaMelliar
Athena Melliar is a feminist poet and essayist. Melliar’s writing faces gender injustices, critiques sexism, societal marginalization, occupational sex segregation. She speaks out for the rights of all self-defining women and LGBTQIA+ community members, and defends all identities—non-binary, disabled women, orphaned women, feminist. Her poems speak to experiences of trauma; she has joined and supports the #MeToo movement. Her poem, Pallid Mirrors, was selected to open the So to Speak Journal #MeToo blog series in January 2018.
Her writing explores powerful female personae from ancient Greek tragedies. Her poems describe the interdependence between poetry and other art forms such as architecture, photography, lyric cryptography*, painting, sculpture, sand art, music, while playing with the boundaries of poetic form.
She loves sociology and thus her poems are often conjured by sociological studies. Her favorite books about sociology and the social sciences are Suicide, A Study In Sociology by Émile Durkheim and The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations by Norbert Elias.
She is an avid reader of literary journals; she believes that the best contemporary poetry is published in literary journals. Moreover, she is currently reading Frank O’Hara’s poetry.
She is a vegetarian trying to improve her zero waste living skills.
Athena Melliar is in love with public libraries; she enjoys listening to jazz music and Dalida’s records.
Her work has appeared in Literary Magazines and journals, LEVELER; Memoir Mixtapes; So to Speak: a feminist journal of language & arts; Moonchild Magazine; The Light Ekphrastic; The Mystic Blue Review, and elsewhere.
ig: athenamelliar
Selected Publications:
- “Pallid Mirrors”
- “Aide-mémoire of Renaissance”
- “I Am, A Metamorphic Danse du Ventre”
- “Causerie”
- “Tripartite Psyche, An Ode to Humankind”
*John Shoptaw, Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2000 (p. pp. 221-262)