Yona Harvey

Yona Harvey
Yona Harvey at Busboys and Poets, 2014
Born	1974 (age 42–43)
Occupation	Poet Professor
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Howard University Ohio State University University of Pittsburgh
Notable works	Hemming the Water

Poet

Yona Harvey (born 1974) is an American poet and assistant professor at University of Pittsburgh. She won the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also an author of Marvel Comics' World of Wakanda, becoming one of the first two black women writing for Marvel.

Harvey graduated from Howard University, where her classmates included writer Ta-Nehesi Coates, playwright Kemp Powers, and poet Doug Kearney, and Ohio State University, and University of Pittsburgh.

Harvey's work has appeared in jubilat, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, and West Branch.

Harvey published her first poetry collection, Hemming the Water, with Four Way Books in 2013. She won 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for the collection and was named a finalist for 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry. Reviewing Hemming the Water in the Pittsburgh City Paper, Mike Schneider said, "At her best — such as 'Rose Lassi' — Harvey creates a feeling of something put together as well as the best machines that sew and sing, every word a necessary part of the whole humming beauty." In the Asterix Journal, Lauren Russell wrote of the collection that its "shiftiness is Harvey’s particular genius. In poems that weave tenderness and violence, the expectation and the surprise, Harvey thwarts the grand cliché even as she courts it, stitching together a polyphony of voices, visions and songs in a patchwork too slippery for any matinee idol to wear."

Harvey is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches in the English department's writing program; her teaching deals with African and disaporic literature and culture, digital and new media, poetry and lyric essays, and multimodal composition. She is on the faculty for The Frost Place's 2017 Conference on Poetry.