Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie (Beacon, 2023), selected by Victoria Chang for the National Poetry Series. A finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Oregon Book Award, Sweet Movie was also shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Slow Motion Something For No Reason (Factory Hollow Press, 2022), was the editors’ choice selection for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her PhD in Divinity from the University of St Andrews, where she wrote a thesis examining ethics in contemporary art, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her creative and critical work has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rebecca Swift Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park. In 2025, her manuscript-in-progress, XOXO, was selected by Cynthia Cruz for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Raised between Columbia, South Carolina, and Prague, Czechia, she now lives in Oregon. @alisha_gabrielle
How did living in Prague and Arkansas shape your view of the world and the kinds of stories you’re drawn to? I was born in West Columbia, South Carolina and raised in Prague, Czechia. I also spent a lot of time with my paternal grandparents on their farm in rural eastern Arkansas (more than once I have heard this described as “the weird part of Arkansas”). My mother’s family is Czech—and largely from Prague—so when my parents decided to become missionaries, Prague felt like a natural fit. (I imagine, at least. These conversations started in the early 80s, before I was born, and they were traveling to the region regularly by the mid-80s.) I think of myself as Southern-adjacent and Czech-adjacent. I don’t really feel American in the truest sense.
In terms of influence, this is a multifaceted question for me, but certainly one I’ve considered; the harder it is to answer the question “where are you from?” the more you tend to consider the subject/self formed in that confusion. I think the loneliness of existing comfortably in neither culture—or uncomfortably in both—has impacted my writing more than closeness, or intimacy with either culture, though I love both deeply. (And maybe its easiest to see them clearly from a slight distance, and this might be true, generally.) I definitely sense an undercurrent of alienation in my writing, but I don’t mind that, and increasingly, I heighten and interrogate this alienation, subtly. The strangeness of being outside isn’t always a bad strangeness.
Place—not just as an absence, but as a presence—absolutely appears in my work, however. The South impacts my syntax, and my intense focus on metaphor and image I think owes itself in part to reading heavily in translation and understanding what translates best. My literary influences, especially my early literary influences, are largely Southern and Czech: William Faulkner and Frank Stanford, Bohumil Hrabal and Miroslav Holub.
As a young reader, what books were you drawn to? And how did they shape your love of language? I didn’t attend school, and honestly didn’t really do school in the traditional sense (my homeschooling, or unschooling, was extremely informal), so I read relentlessly. I read everything: whole encyclopedias, old National Geographics, in-flight magazines, cover to cover, The Economist, Westerns, Henry Miller, Virgil, the Brontës, absolutely anything about the wives of Henry VIII. I read out of loneliness and curiosity. I don’t know if there was one book or set of books that made me love reading. I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t loved, or at least needed, reading.
What kind of structure do you give your writing hours when working on a book? I like to read before I write, if I have time. I still try to read as widely and wildly as I can, and I take notes on the content, but also on the language, as it appeals to me or compels me or challenges me. I keep long lists of words and phrases for future use. Reading, in this case, might mean Agamben and it might mean grocery store advertisements for weekly deals (or, ideally, both). I try to read at least two types of texts at the same time so poetry and a novel or theory and poetry or a novel and like, candy wrappers and also poetry.
When I write, I edit ruthlessly as I go; I attempt to read my own work as critically as possible and let remain only what passes this test. If I don’t wake up in the morning thinking I want to read the poem I wrote the day before, I scrap it and I’m not allowed to look at it again. This is more of a challenge with prose, but possible. I am a perfectionist only with cooking and writing (and let me tell you some things FALL TO THE WAYSIDE because of this).
I don’t write at a desk. I sit on a small couch. This permits greater comfort and access for my assistants, Frank (Stanford) and Ishmael (my cats).
Tell us about the creative process behind your most well-known work or your current writing project. My latest project, "XOXO," a book-length love poem, started with a text message. Someone I know in a professional context signed a text with xoxo and then promptly texted to apologize for the informality/possible connotations. I hadn’t even thought about it, but then I started to think a lot about X’s and O’s and xoxo and the erotic potential of both letters, which suddenly seemed incredibly fascinating to me, like the (two) coolest people at a party. I liked how X could function, too, as a stand-in for something unsaid, or someone unnamed. I began to write small poems—that would eventually form the larger whole—that all appeared under an X or an O. Sometimes the relationship between the text and the text’s assigned letter is overt, such as a section formed entirely of lines that start with O, or a section about Double X film, and other times the relationship occurs in more abstract ways (for example, "XOXO" is a love poem, the whole poem is about love).
For a while prior to starting to write "XOXO," my life had begun to appear in my writing in ways that disturbed and unsettled me. I think writers often want to control the narrative arc of our life at least as it appears in writing, but I experienced a series of events that made me recognize my own powerless and vulnerability. I felt entirely out of control. The tiny X’s and O’s made some order of the chaos I felt. "XOXO" came out of place of both frenzy, and intense, responsive precision.
Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it? I don’t journal. I do bind small notebooks that I fill with ideas and words and phrases and descriptions of sensations. Maybe this is a nonlinear journal.
What’s your approach to research—formal, instinctive, or a mix of both? The reading I do to prepare to write (a kind of warm-up, almost) functions like research, in ways. I often write responsively; this feels particularly true of my process for "XOXO!" I’d read a book, and then think for days about some element that I couldn’t escape. (The first line of "XOXO," "Always” means “Eternally" from Alain Badiou’s "In Praise of Love," for example, I couldn’t sleep because of that line, essentially. It hunted me down. I’m still thinking about it.)
Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with? John Donne. Final Answer. Can I also invite Pasolini to this dinner? I have some related questions for both of them.
Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines? I wouldn’t write poetry without the help of other art, visual art, and film, in particular. I love to write responsively to movies. I’ll take photos while watching and notes and rearrange the stills in ways that feels like each image is the line in a poem and I’ll try to "translate" that into language. (Three movies I have been thinking about lately Ulrich Seidl’s "Import/Export," Pasolini’s "Medea," and Peter Weir’s "Picnic at Hanging Rock.")
AI and technology are changing the ways we write and receive stories. What are your reflections on AI? How do you see AI shaping the future of writing and literature? I think artists/writers (myself included) have at times focused too heavily on AI’s technical failings (it doesn’t create "good" art, etc.), when I think we should focus more on AI’s moral failings. It adds a further layer of alienation of laborer from commodity, it’s horrible for the environment and—to get truly polemical—it’s bad for the soul. When teaching, I’ve noticed a steep decline in my students’ capacity for creativity and independent ethical thinking since the rise of AI. That’s a tragedy that we’ve wrought, that we’re participating in every day. The passive language around AI attempts to make us feel that AI is inevitable; it strips us of agency in the process. AI will succeed if we let it, and it will fail if we don’t.
We aren’t powerless, we’re apathetic.
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. In no particular order, some recent favorites
"Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other" – Danielle Dutton, "All the Eyes that I have Opened" – Franca Mancinelli, "Marxist Modernism" – Gillian Rose, "Gentlemen Callers" – Corrine Hoex, "While We Were Dreaming" – Clemens Meyer, "Alphabet" – Inger Christensen, "A Sensitive Person" – Jáchym Topol, "Hormone of Darkness" – Tilsa Otta, "Morning and Evening" – Jon Fosse, "Kairos" – Jenny Erpenbeck, "Break Every Rule" – Carole Maso, "Walden Pond" – Patty Nash, "The Rainbow" – D.H. Lawrence, "Paradais" – Fernanda Melchor
(Also) In no particular order, some forever favorites:
"The Piano Teacher" and "Women as Lovers" – Elfriede Jelinek, "Secondhand Time" – Svetlana Alexievich, "The Land of Green Plums" – Herta Müller, "I Served The King of England" – Bohumil Hrabal, "A Simple Passion" – Annie Ernaux, "Childhood," "Youth," "Dependency" – Tove Ditlevsen, "The Waste Land" – T.S. Eliot, "Absalom, Absalom!" – William Faulkner, "2666"– Roberto Bolaño, "Speech! Speech!" – Geoffrey Hill, "Child of God" – Cormac McCarthy, anything by Frank Stanford and also anything by Nabokov but truthfully, "Lolita," most of all, Adorno’s "Aesthetic Theory," Donne’s "Holy Sonnets"
I know I’m forgetting so many.
Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to… God. (But honestly, I mostly mean this; writing has become more and more of a spiritual practice for me.)
