SAS Speaker Spotlight: Ally Ang

Ally Ang is a gaysian poet and editor based in Seattle. They are the author of Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books 2025), hailed as one of the most anticipated debut books of 2025 by Electric Literature and Debutiful and one of the best poetry collections of 2024 and 2025 by Ms. Magazine. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, The Seattle Met, and elsewhere. Ally has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Artist Trust, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Find them at allysonang.com or @TheOceanIsGay.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Ally to get to know them more before their SAS debut in 2026. Read below!

Norah Clifford: What can you tell us about beginning your creative journey and discovering yourself as a poet? Did you always know it would be poetry?

Ally Ang: Like many poets, I was an awkward introverted kid with a lot of feelings who didn’t know what to do with them. I came to poetry early—I had a big Shakespeare/Plath/Eliot phase when I was a pretentious preteen—but it was only in high school when I discovered the work of contemporary queer poets of color through Def Poetry and Button Poetry videos on Youtube that I realized I could write poems about my own life. Previously, because I was only reading dead white poets, I thought that poetry had to be “universal” (read: from a white/male/cishet/otherwise normative perspective) in order to be legitimate, but contemporary queer and trans poets of color taught me that my identities and experiences were worthy poetic subjects as well. As I came to terms with my queerness and mixed race identity, poetry helped me make sense of myself and the world around me. 

NC: Reading your collection, the openings of your poems continued to strike me. All are captivating, immediately pulling you forward, and yet anti-formulaic. Can you speak to how you approach openings and what hopes you have for the reader in the first few lines?

AA: Thank you! I rarely enter a poem knowing what it’s going to be “about”; usually a poem starts when I think of an opening line or title that excites me. From there, the process of discovering the rest of the poem is one of play and experimentation, and I hope that the reader feels that too as they come on the journey with me. I often choose poem titles that go right into the body of the poem and serve as a kind of opening line; I feel like it makes the poem’s energy very propulsive and it can also subvert or complicate the title in a fun way. Coming up with an opening to a poem feels easy; it’s the endings that really stump me.

NC: You play with form in such engaging and sometimes surprising ways. What’s the relationship between poetic content and form in your work? Which typically comes first in your writing process?

AA: When I first came to poetry, I used to (foolishly, arrogantly) be opposed to form because I didn’t think that poetry should have any rules; I believed that rules hindered expression. It was only as I began to read more widely and study craft more rigorously that I learned how wrong I was and how much freedom form can provide. As I first began to draft this book, I was reading many poets who were doing innovative things with received and invented forms and that inspired me to play with form in my own work. A lot of this book was an experiment in terms of finding my voice and style as a poet. 

Sometimes when I’m stuck on a poem, either in the drafting or revision stages, I will give myself a formal constraint and that often unlocks something for me. For some reason, it feels less daunting to say “I’m going to write a ghazal” than it is to just stare at a blank page and try to make a poem appear. Writing in form feels like trying to solve a puzzle and it gives me such a rush when I finally figure out how to make a form work for the poem. Plus, then there’s the added pleasure of taking a form and breaking or disrupting it. 

NC: Many of your poems “shrink” at the end, closing with just one line or shorter stanzas than what preceded.  What effect do you hope to create with this structure? How do you want your reader to leave a poem?

AA: I had a professor years ago who really hated that move—he said it put undue emphasis and pressure on that final line/stanza/word. I like to think that I do it with purpose, though. Sometimes, I feel strongly that the final line does deserve that extra weight; sometimes I do it to deliberately break the formal patterns I’ve established and leave the reader with a lack of closure; sometimes I do it just to annoy that professor. 

NC: “June 23, 1982” is a particularly gut-wrenching piece; many of your other poems also engage with heavy themes. What calls to you when writing about such topics, and how do you refine raw emotional experience into tangible language?

AA: I often write from a place of anger and grief, two emotions that I find very difficult to be present with as I feel them. Being angry and sad makes me uncomfortable, and expressing rage and sorrow is even more challenging. I’m afraid that if I let myself feel those emotions, I’m going to open the floodgates and never be able to close them again and the emotions will consume me. Having poetry as a container within which I can process and language those emotions makes them feel less daunting. I like that poetry doesn’t require you to have answers or resolution or clarity; I like that poetry doesn’t demand the logic of other genres. Poetry feels like a fitting genre for these big emotions that defy linearity and rationality. Being able to draw upon image and figurative language and form helps me make sense—or embrace the senselessness—of intense anger and grief. 

NC: What are you working on now that you’re excited about?

AA: I’m very slowly working on some new poems that I hope will one day become my second poetry collection. I’m writing a lot about the relationship between gender and spirituality. To transition is to remake one's body and to participate in the art of creation; in this way, it is a uniquely divine act. How, then, can a trans person reconcile their own divinity with the ways that dominant religious frameworks and institutions have wielded God as a weapon to punish, shame, and suppress trans people? And as someone who has been harmed and oppressed by masculinity, is it possible to create and embody masculinities that are rooted in care rather than domination? These are the questions I’m grappling with in the new work.

Newsletter Editor, Norah Clifford | info@tennesseewilliams.net 

Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival is a program of

The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

612 Andrew Higgins Drive #2009, New Orleans, LA 70130

info@tennesseewilliams.net  |  504-581-1144

www.tennesseewilliams.net