SARA DENIZ AKANT is a Turkish-American poet, educator, and performer. She is the author of Babette (Rescue Press 2015), selected by Maggie Nelson for the Black Box Prize in Poetry, as well as the chapbooks Parades (Omnidawn 2014), and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions 2015). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and has taught writing at Baruch, Medgar Evers, John Jay, and Hunter College. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she researches 20th-century poetics along the intersections of language, gender, and empire.