DURIEL E. HARRIS is the author of the poetry collection Drag, a multivocal symphony in five movements. An acclaimed poet, performance/sound artist and scholar, her work has been featured and published internationally. Harris holds degrees from Yale University and the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. A co-founder of the Black Took Collective and member of Douglas Ewart and Inventions free jazz ensemble, she is an assistant professor of English and teaches creative writing and poetics at Illinois State University.


“Duriel Harris is a poet who pushes, lures, cajoles us into the uncharted, the uneasy, the unsettled. Wildly, thrillingly experimental, yet Amnesiac navigates not only the ether and the subterranean, but the ground where we all live.”—Nick Flynn

“ Extraordinary forms of amnesia and memory run through Duriel Harris’s work. Sometimes she forgets an essential thing, owing to early trauma, and substitutes something otherwise essential: the truth about her life and, easily forgotten for some, African American history. So this book is about struggle and memory, repression and revelation—the stuff dreams and poetry are made of.”—Stanley Moss