About Alonna

Alonna Shaw is a poet and visual artist whose work emerges through movement and place. For her, poetry is not separate from the other arts. An image isn’t static. Sound carries gesture. Rhythm becomes a tactile experience.

Her creative practice is rooted in the experience of being there. As she moves through environments, she seeks people willing to share their experiences and perspectives on the strange ethics of being human. Experience becomes dialogue and shared witnessing rather than isolated authorship.

From early childhood, Alonna was drawn to exploration as a form of visual thinking. Curiosity led her down wild animal trails in the northern Michigan forests, learning nonverbal forms of attention and instinct from the twitches of her pony’s ears, indicating how to continue.

She read every book in her small library, imitating poets, writers, artists, and architects until realizing what imitation was and that it wasn’t her. That recognition became part of her artistic formation. The lifelong trek of being came from a place of personal vulnerability and began with curiosity. Confidence arose through gesture, and subtle humor gave her feet something to stand on.

That same questioning curiosity shapes her work today. Whether tracking shifting materials along the California coast, facilitating collaborative close reading, or moving through the streets and subway stairs of Tokyo, movement gathers images and words that later emerge through poetry, visual art, and voice.

A longtime community teaching assistant with the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House ModPo community, Alonna is deeply interested in one-on-one exchange and small-group collaborative reading. Humor as a human connection allows room to enjoy the ways people communicate experience imperfectly through language.

Her work often moves between vulnerability, conceptual play, and subtle wit while exploring memory, consumer culture, embodiment, and the tensions between surface and depth. She is currently based in Japan.

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle,
I no longer despair for the future of the human race."
—H. G. Wells