POET | EDUCATOR
DeeSoul Carson is a poet, educator, and host of the O, Word? podcast. A Stanford alum, his work is featured in Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, The Offing, & elsewhere. His chapbook, Running From Streetlights (2020), is a meditation on Blackness in America during the “Summer of Racial Reckoning.” For his work, DeeSoul has received a National Endowment for the Arts and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the NYU MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.
DeeSoul’s poetry is interested in the interrogation of laughter, joy, and absurdity, particularly as it pertains to Black existence, asking what keeps Black people laughing despite their struggles, who’s laughing with them, and who’s not quite in on the joke.
His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027.
Teaching Statement
As a writing poet, DeeSoul believes poetry encompasses any text (or non-text, when applicable) that engages in rhetorical experimentation. Far less concerned with strict definitions, DeeSoul is interested in instead asking what happens — to our expectations, to our readings, to our framing — when we call something a poem. As an instructor, DeeSoul is interested in a poetics of inquiry, an approach that focuses less on “what” a poem is and more on the “why” — why poets make the choices they do, how we extract meaning from those choices, and why we feel certain poems succeed where others fail. Through descriptive observation and mindful lines of inquiry, DeeSoul encourages a poetics that begins with questions rather than criticisms, and leads to thoughtful experimentation rather than conformity to expectation.