Artist Bio

Emily Ruth Hazel is a cross-pollinating poet, author, and artist who is passionate about diversifying the audience for poetry and the contexts in which we find it. As the owner and creator of Wild Honey Words—a poetry-meets-art boutique that offers expressive accessories, journals, and gifts featuring her words and designs—Emily brings everyday life into poetry and brings poetry into everyday life. Her poems have appeared in a hair salon art installation and in a science museum exhibition as well as in numerous anthologies, magazines, literary journals, and digital projects. Her lyrics have been featured on chamber jazz and Americana albums.

Commissioned as the Honorary Poet for the 25th Annual Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading in Providence, Rhode Island, she wrote a tribute to the “Poet Laureate of Harlem” titled Rhapsody in Red, White, and Blue (The Songs We Stitch Together), which was published as a chapbook and performed in February of 2020. In 2014, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to develop a full-length poetry book manuscript during a residency at The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences. Her first chapbook, Body & Soul (Finishing Line Press, 2005), was a New Women’s Voices finalist. Emily is a two-time recipient of national Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes and has written more than twenty commissioned works. 

She has performed her poetry solo and collaboratively at more than one hundred happenings and has shared the stage with musicians, actors, and dancers. A graduate of Oberlin College’s Creative Writing Program, she has led writing workshops at libraries, schools, and community centers from New York to South Africa, including poetry workshops for drawing and architecture students at Cooper Union and workshops for underserved teens at Girls Write Now, a New York City nonprofit dedicated to nurturing the next generation of women writers. Currently based in the foothills of Los Angeles, Emily is developing several poetry book manuscripts and cowriting lyrics for MARIAN, an original musical inspired by the life of the extraordinary singer, cultural bridge builder, and Civil Rights foremother Marian Anderson.

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Photograph by Justin T. Shockley