Evie Shockley

Evie Shockley is the author of three books of poetry: semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017); the new black (Wesleyan, 2011); and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006); and two poetry chapbooks (31 words: prose poems from Belladonna Books and The Gorgon Goddess from Carolina Wren). Her poetry has been published widely in journals and anthologies and has been supported by Cave Canem, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Hedgebrook. She co-edits the poetry journal jubilat. Also a scholar, her critical essays appear in such publications as Callaloo, Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, and African American Review. Her study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. Shockley received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry for the new black and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, and she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for semiautomatic in 2018. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing.