Meredith Nnoka

Meredith Nnoka

Meredith Nnoka (they/she) is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of Les Portes (2026), selected by Cameron Awkward-Rich as the winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, and the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman (2023) and A Hunger Called Music (2016). Meredith has a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, both in Africana studies. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

Les Portes (Autumn House Press) traces how harm against women and femmes takes root, recurs, and reshapes itself across generations. In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.

Now available from Bookshop.

Praise for Les Portes

“Written from within a blessedly unfinished and particular life, Les Portes is a tender meditation on intimacy, survival, the violent ‘history available to repeat,’ and how we might, nonetheless, reach toward each other. Moving from the child’s doomed certainty of the gendered harm she will inherit, to the enclosing repetitions of queer domestic abuse, to the woman’s flight away into ‘the bright world again / carrying every year of [her] life in [her] hands,’ this searching debut allows us to witness a voice wrestling with form in order to come honestly into its own. I am grateful to this poet for her honesty, her opacity, her directness, her ambivalence, her arrival, not at closure, but at more openness to questions about how to desire a future absent of harm—after we ‘break apart, shatter, / melt down the very machinery’—while living on in a world, a self, so thoroughly shaped by it. That is, this is the kind of book I find myself reaching for these days, one that helps me to feel something new about how to live, as we all do, in the aftermath—the aftermath of our personal traumas and losses and leavings, the aftermath of the racist/heteropatriarchal order that gives them form.”

—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch

“Les Portes is a book we all must take into the next phase of humanity, of history. Nnoka’s way of truth telling is so alive, so patient and precise, I feel almost immobilized. I recognize all these thoughts and feelings—I have not been alone. This poet’s knife work cuts it all open, incisive, bloodletting. I breathe this living truth all in, poem by poem, and even though ‘we’re not safe yet’—I feel such hope blooming in my blood. Yes.”

—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum

“At once haunting and refreshingly uplifting, the poems in this small, powerful volume invite readers into the space where love, pain, and desire meet resistance and hope. Nnoka is a beautiful writer whose body of work centers on a clear analysis of harm in queer relationships, while revealing the complex space between self-soothing and surrender. The poems are graceful and generative and will seep into the heart of readers from start to finish.”

—Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.

“Meredith Nnoka is a poet of daring ethical imagination. Through language at once elegant in syntax and jagged in emotional truth, Les Portes excavates ‘an unknown history of fire’ in order to move closer to ‘something like love.’ To understand harm, its origins, and how to address it, Nnoka is not satisfied to examine only the self or the immediate other; she must investigate whole family histories as well as the power structures built around race, gender, and queerness. But never does she forget the everyday scale at which intimate partner violence occurs—nor how a single illuminating image can push toward another life possibility. What an expansive and unforgettable debut.”

—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“Like the English speaker unaccustomed to the gendered grammatical system of another language, readers of Les Portes may find Nnoka’s scrutiny of gendered violence in queer relationships between women unfamiliar. Indeed, it is rare to read an account of violence between women, rarer still to read from the perspective of a Black queer woman…Reading these poems, the survivor in me almost folds in a bend of gratitude for a poetic so willing to ask, as the speaker does in ‘No One Deserves What’s Been Done to My Bloodline,’ ‘What do I do with the harm already inflicted?’ and then wait for the resonances, echo as they may.”

—Jenna Goldsmith, Chicago Review of Books

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