Tamiko Beyer is a poet and freelance writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, We Come Elemental (Alice James Books) and two chapbooks: Dovetail (co-authored with Kimiko Hahn, Slapering Hol Press) and bough breaks (Meritage Press). Her poems, reviews, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Literary Hub, the Rumpus, Hyphen, Dusie, and elsewhere. She has received grants and fellowships from Kundiman and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund among others. A social justice communications writer and strategist, she spends her days writing truth to power. She live in Dorchester, MA and online at tamikobeyer.com.

“[LAST DAYS] envisions a societal renaissance toward justice and equity, toward an evolved consciousness that sees all living matter as a part of a singular, vast, interdependent organism. The poetry doesn’t necessarily offer us a path to get there, but rather interrogates obstacles we face, sheds light on dark corners of language that complicate our perspectives, and imagines a future world free from the colonizing impulse.”
—Sarah D’Stair, Adroit Journal

“Featuring a group of charismatic young revolutionaries and their struggle to navigate a post-apocalyptic world, Last Days celebrates hope, resilient joy, and the beauty of human interconnectedness. Beyer writes with the deep tenderness, empathy, and breathtaking lyric clarity that is a hallmark of her work.”
—The Lantern Review

“Beyer writes of the importance of reclaiming power ... Last Days is song-filled and feathered; a murmuration; a brilliant manifesto for survival.”
—Luisa A. Igloria, RHINO

"With each read, we are taken by this story’s necessary vision of the future and what it reflects of the present. This is more than an apocalypse story—it is composite and collage, a new way of storytelling that blurs all lines between ‘poem’ and ‘prose’ and ‘essay.’ This is unnerving in the way genre-bending work should be. It reflects and refracts the end of the world."
—Chris Burke, 2018 BWR Fiction Editor, & Cat Ingrid Leeches, 2018 BWR Editor, on “Last Days, Part 1”, winner of the 2019 Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers from PEN America.

"At this moment in history, a singular question often arises: what happens to the self and to the group when a keen part of ourself is the Other? Tamiko Beyer allows the question to be complex because, for her, even being human has its Otherness. In the phrase 'slip // of boundaries' ('Estuaries'), we are introduced early in the collection to a staff that may assist in climbing into and along with these gorgeous poems, some of which 'slip' form from Western open verse to authentically realized haiku and haibun. The slip is also identity from mixed race to queer to class to human; the slip is language as well as poetics—especially for those in Japanese forms; and it is that abiding psychological Freudian slip. (And perhaps, a female garment, given Beyer’s playfulness!) And, then there is location, whether subterranean or alternate. Enter into this collection of Last Days and enjoy powerful discoveries in her crossings and lines."
—Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies

"Spare language. Exactly the right words. Ancestors meet corporations, haibun meets words that form paragraphs. That which is wild. That which has been controlled. That which is intimate, personal, specific. That which tells the truth of violence as a cultural; a national practice. Tamiko Beyer’s poetry is an experiment in revolution, a place where poem and embodiment are the same. A murmuration, a flood, an anchor in the mud. These are poems that whisper to your bones."
—Susan Raffo