Tiana Nobile

twitter: @tiananob

Tiana Nobile was born in South Korea and adopted as an infant. Currently, she lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she works for an arts education nonprofit. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, MAT in elementary and special education from the University of New Orleans, and MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Tiana is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Kundiman fellow, and a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is the author of the chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (2017). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others.
In her current manuscript, Tiana explores the history and complexities of transnational and transracial adoption, both her own and the broader collective experience. She is primarily interested in investigating the impact adoption has on the body, memory, and language.
Lately, Tiana has been reading in conversation with fellow Asian American adoptee poets, Leah Silvieus, Ansley Moon, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and Sun Yung Shin. Together, these five poets formed the “Adoptee Book Club,” a group that gathers regularly to discuss books that are written by adoptees and/or contain adoptee narratives. Recent books include The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies, Interrogation Room by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong, and All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung.In her spare time, Tiana likes to garden, go fishing with her spouse, and make pasta from scratch. Second lines on Sundays are her favorite.

 

A few poems: