Poet & scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we, which received the NAACP Image Award and was a National Book Award Finalist; semiautomatic, which received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and the new black, which received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.  Her literary criticism includes Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry and numerous essays.  Most recently, she is editor of the Norton Library edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Among the honors for her body of work in poetry are the Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award.  Her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.

(Photo credit: Stéphane Robolin)