Donna Stonecipher is among the most distinctive American poets working today, a master of the prose poem whose work has consistently explored the relationship between poetry, architecture, and urban experience. Born in Seattle in 1969 and raised between Seattle and Tehran, she has lived in Berlin on and off since 2004. She is the author of six books of poetry, including The Reservoir (2002), The Cosmopolitan/i> (winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series), Model City (2015), Transaction Histories (2018, named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by The New York Times), and The Ruins of Nostalgia (2023, named a best book of the year by NPR). She has also published Prose Poetry and the City (2018), a critical study of the formal and historical relationship between prose poetry and urban experience. Her translations of the late Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker's prose poetry trilogy, études, cahier, and fleurs, are being published by Seagull Books. She has recently completed a book about architectural ornament in Berlin, which is forthcoming from MIT Press. In this conversation, conducted in Berlin in January and February 2026, we discussed the transformation of cities, nostalgia as resistance, the prose poem as an urban form, and Stonecipher’s experience as an American poet living in Berlin.