Aria Aber (born 1991)^[1] is a German-born poet and writer based in the United States.

Aber was born and raised in Münster,^[2] Germany to Afghan refugees.^[3] Aber moved to London in 2011 and graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English literature. She later completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry at New York University.^[1]

Aber's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Kenyon Review.

Aber has received awards and fellowships from Kundiman,^[4] the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing,^[5] and the Whiting Foundation.^[6] Aber was the spring 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College.^[7] She was formerly a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.^[8]

Aber is a faculty member of the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of Creative Writing and resides between Vermont and Brooklyn.^[9]

Aber's first full-length collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was published in September 2019 by University of Nebraska Press.^[10]

In a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Claire Schwartz wrote, "Hard Damage—which elaborates a constellation of beauty and terror between Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States—is vexed by the meanings of bringing across."^[11]

In an interview at The Yale Review, Aber has stated, "Especially the English language is political, because it has operated as a colonizing force in many places around the world, and changed global indigenous languages forever, if not completely eradicated them. If poetry is "the soul of a nation" (this quote is attributed to T.S. Eliot, though I cannot fact-check the source), and our nation is an empire actively participating in displacement and warfare, it feels only natural to me that these topics surface in poetry."^[3]

Via Hogarth Press, Aber's debut fiction novel Good Girl was published in 2024. The novel follows a young German-Afghan woman in Berlin's party scene.^{[12][13][14][15][16]}

Aber is married to Canadian-American writer Noah Warren; their wedding was officiated by Louise Glück, who was one of Aber's teachers at the Stegner Fellowship.^[17][18]

• Hard Damage (2019)^[19]

• Good Girl (2025, Hogarth)

• Official website
• Pádraig Ó Tuama reads & discusses Aria Aber’s poem The Only Cab Service of Farmington, Maine