Rate My Professor Arisa White

Arisa White is Associate Professor of English (Creative Writing) and Creative Writing Director at Colby College, where she joined the faculty in 2018 and received tenure. She previously served as a visiting scholar at San Francisco State University’s The Poetry Center, developing a digital special collection on Black Women Poets in the Poetry Center Archives. White earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College. A Cave Canem fellow, she has held residencies, fellowships, and scholarships from The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She serves on the community advisory board of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and created the Beautiful Things Project, which curates poetic collaborations rooted in Black queer women’s ways of knowing.

White is the author of several poetry collections nominated for the NAACP Image Award, Lambda Literary Award, California Book Award, and Wheatley Book Award, including the poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy (Augury Books, 2021). Other publications include Hurrah’s Nest (2013, finalist for the Wheatley Book Awards and 82nd California Book Awards), A Penny Saved (2012, inspired by the true-life story of Polly Mitchell), and You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened (nominated for the Lambda Literary Award). She co-edited Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter Press, 2021) and co-authored Biddy Mason Speaks Up (Heyday, 2019), the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers, which won the Maine Literary Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction, FOCAL Award, and Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal for Multicultural Juvenile Nonfiction; it is included in the New York City Department of Education’s Mosaic curriculum. Her chapbooks include “Fish Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife, winner of the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. White is the librettist for Post Pardon: The Opera, which premiered in concert in 2025 and explores themes of mental health, inherited sorrow, and African-diasporic spirituality.