Baker Artist Portfolios

ISSAM ZINEH is a poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of The Moment of Greatest Alienation (Ethel, 2021) and Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022), a Trio House Press Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Medal Provocateur, Housatonic Book Award, and Balcones Prize for Poetry. He is a Los Angeles-born son of immigrants who has lived in places with deep histories of colonial and racial violence. His work is acutely conscious of the erasure of indigenous communities and the impacts of transgenerational trauma traceable to geographical, political, and cultural displacement.

The work of Unceded Land is to engage with "territory" as both demarcated physical and psychological spaces and explore associated concepts: boundaries, identity, power, subjugation, resistance, and reconciliation. It interrogates social, political, and ecological violence as informed by a diasporic consciousness. Building on this, Zineh's current interest lies in what “a poetics of tenderness” might look like as a countervailing force to hegemonic masculinity (the version of “manhood” endorsed by the dominant culture and often violently maintained by institutional power). The backdrop of this inquiry is the specter of hegemonic masculinity as a system of social practices that delegitimize and repress challenges to the status quo through a range of violences including political and economic exclusion, intimidation, physical violence, and language as a violent act.

His writing appears in AGNI, Columbia Journal, The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal where he received the 2024 Majda Gama Editors' Prize, and elsewhere. He has lived on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Piscataway and the Susquehannock people (aka Baltimore, MD) since 2008.