Asa Drake (she/her)

Asa Drake is the author of "Maybe the Body" (Tin House, 2026) and "Beauty Talk" (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems can be found in the Georgia Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Awards: 2024 Noemi Press Book Award for "Beauty Talk," 2023 Florida Book Awards (Chapbook Gold) for "One Way to Listen," 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest Winner

Communities: Asian American, Mixed Race

Books:

Beauty Talk

Poetry
Noemi Press
October 2026
ISBN 9781955992732
Paperback, 0 pages

Intimate, wry and a little sour, Asa Drake's Beauty Talk addresses the (im)possibility of talking about beauty in America without addressing whiteness. Here is a personal history of who gets to be beautiful. While Beauty Talk pulls from the autobiographical: a father as the 1970's Camel cigarette man, correspondences with abandoned siblings, an historic family map; the collection is shaped by the illegibility, omission and ekphrasis of the personal archive. Embracing a fractal telling, these poems explore an inheritance of mixed aesthetics and what it means to partake in a lineage that is both colonial and immigrant. Drake pulls from sources as varied as Chiwan Choi's adaptation of the Bechdel test and Viv Chen's substack The Molehill to index the racial and gendered language of advertisement copy, incident reports, and parental beauty advice. Woven between these coded distinctions of moral and aesthetic utility, Beauty Talk asks if, perhaps, family is the first commodification of the body. More/less

Maybe the Body

Poems
Poetry
Tin House
February 2026
ISBN 9781963108682
Paperback, 0 pages

A Debutiful Best Debut Book of 2026 “Radiant . . . a generous offering full of flora and fury. ” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil A brilliant debut poetry collection by National Poetry Series finalist Asa Drake that explores the lineage and future lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance. In her stunning debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, Asa Drake witnesses firsthand the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. She reaches for the lush landscapes—real and recounted—of the Philippines and the American South as she traces the lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance. As one poem reminds us, "it's so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in." These thirty-eight poems, threaded together with a six-part braided sequence, bind a multigenerational conversation between grandmothers, mothers, and aunts through a range of forms, from pantoums to prose poems. With its vivid imagery and an unforgettable lyrical perspective, Maybe the Body reconsiders the natural transactions of work, intimacy, and the poem itself. More/less