In July, when a stunning poem by Marissa Davis showed up on Rattle, I got emails from literary friends around the country who also subscribe to the online publication. They were impressed by the poem, “Katabasis,” but confused that Davis, a Paducah native, was showcased in a tribute to Appalachian poets.
The twenty-six-year-old explained her dichotomous bio in a note at the end of her poem. “Though I was raised mostly in western Kentucky,” she wrote, “my parents are from Ironton, Ohio, a small river town in the Appalachian foothills where most of my family still lives. In a way, the region is the ancestral home of my craft as much as my personhood.”
Marissa Davis (Photo by Jenna Lanzaro)
Nevertheless, Marissa is also a proud Paducah native who attended Morgan Elementary, Paducah Middle, and Paducah Tilghman High School. As a teenager, she attended Governor’s School for the Arts, an experience that marked a shift in her creative writing from fiction to poetry. One of her instructors, Kelly Norman Ellis, inspired Marissa by introducing the students to contemporary poetry and its diversity.
In school, Marissa had become familiar with more traditional poetry, but her creative focus expanded through GSA.
“Poetry doesn’t belong solely to history,” she realized. “It has its own life. I learned that poetry could be more relatable and diverse.”
From Tilghman, she went on to Vanderbilt University and began publishing and receiving recognition for her poetry. She resided in a foreign language immersion dorm for three years and then spent two years in France. “So for five years straight, I was somehow lucky enough to sneak French into my daily life,” she said.
In 2019-2020, the first year of her MFA at New York University, she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. Her second year she became Translations Editor for Washington Square Review. In 2021, she served as one of the judges for the prestigious PEN Award for Poetry as Translation.
In 2019, the Paducah native won the coveted Cave Canem Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak. About choosing the manuscript for the award, Danez Smith described Davis’ work as “a voice so varied and skilled one has to step back to see that the work is not that of a great, anthologized generation but one stellar talent singing all the choir parts perfectly, wildly.”
Wow!
She recently celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday and has already published poems and translations in an array of literary journals and online sites. Currently working at Penguin Random House with Viking, Penguin Books, and Penguin Classics, she describes her professional responsibilities as helping with the technical part of the publishing process, moving a project from the editorial to the production phase.
Marissa Davis calls the Bushwick section of Brooklyn home, but last year COVID brought her back to Paducah for a time and she recently spent a few months in France. She appreciates the landscape she grew up with but acknowledges its beauty was mitigated by being “raised on a fault line, in tornado country, in a river valley not wholly impervious to flood, and destruction on some scale felt not just possible, but impending.”
Wherever she resides, her mission is clear. “I’m always striving toward the organic: in language, for a June-like lushness; in tone, for a rolling, arabesque-ing, beeze-in-treetops sort of elegance.”
Marissa Davis’s award-winning chapbook, My Name & Other Languages I am Learning How to Speak is published by Jai-Alai Books. Her website www.marissa-davis.com contains additional information about her many publications, translations, interviews, and upcoming literary events.
