ABOUT
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Neil Tangaroa Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight which won the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
and was published by Anhinga Press in 2008. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and has appeared
in Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, Poetry Southeast, Sou'wester, and elsewhere.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Neil grew up in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the western parts of the United States and Canada. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California - Riverside, and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Prior to pursuing graduate work in creative writing, Neil was a computer programmer for a multi-national games publisher. Although he no longer writes game code for companies, his love of programming and technology has recently manifested itself in his current poetry manuscript project, Babbage's Dream, which explores the themes of exile, beauty, and isolation within the world of computers and computer programmers. Poems from this manuscript have already been finding homes in fine literary journals. When not writing poetry or designing websites, Neil serves as the editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, an online literary journal focused on publishing poetry and showcasing reviews and interviews pertaining to first books of poetry. You can visit it here. |
Photo credit: Dawnae Wilson Neil Aitken is a poet of consummate grace and skill. His poems are acutely observed, unerring musically, sensual and lyrical. Filled with longing and subtle epiphanies, his poetry plumbs the depths of the human heart, and hints towards the heights of the human spirit. His writing accomplishes what Wallace Stevens suggested—that, in the best poems, “description is revelation,” for each of Aitken’s poems reveals the world anew for the reader. —Maurya Simon |