Nicole Sealey

Last updated
Nicole Sealey
Born1979 (age 44–45)
St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
Education University of South Florida (MLA in Africana studies)
New York University (MFA in creative writing)
OccupationPoet
Notable workThe Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named
"Pages 22–29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure"
Awards2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem

Nicole Sealey (born 1979) [1] is an American poet who was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, US. [2] She is the former executive director of Cave Canem Foundation. [3] She won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize for The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, and her collection Ordinary Beast was a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. [4] Her poem "Pages 22–29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure" ( Poetry London ) won a Forward Prize for Poetry in October 2021. [5] Sealey lives in Brooklyn, New York. [2]

Contents

Background

Born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Sealey was raised in Apopka, Florida, and received an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida. [6] After participating from 2005 to 2010 in Cave Canem Foundation workshops led by poets such as Marilyn Nelson, Willie Perdomo and Patricia Smith, [7] Sealey decided at the age of 32 to commit to a career as a poet, going on to earn an MFA degree in creative writing at New York University. [6] [8] Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018 and 2021, The New Yorker , The Paris Review , and other publications. [9]

She has received fellowships and awards including from CantoMundo, the Cave Canem Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. [2] In 2019, she was named a 2019–2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. [2] From 2017 to 2019 she was the Executive Director at the Cave Canem Foundation, and was the curator for a special series of Poem-a-Day (August 31–September 11, 2020). [2]

Sealey began making erasures from the 2015 United States Department of Justice report [10] detailing bias policing and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri, three years after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police, [1] and in October 2021, her "Pages 22–29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure" (published in Poetry London ) [11] won the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. [12] The judges of the prize referred to Sealey's use of the report's "stifling obfuscations" to create "new moments of lyrical beauty and contemplation", and called her work "a poem of resonant cultural and social value". [13]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erasure poetry</span> Form of poetry

Erasure poetry, or blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry or found object art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forward Prizes for Poetry</span> British poetry award(s)

The Forward Prizes for Poetry are major British awards for poetry, presented annually at a public ceremony in London. They were founded in 1992 by William Sieghart with the aim of celebrating excellence in poetry and increasing its audience. The prizes do this by identifying and honouring talent: collections published in the UK and Ireland over the course of the previous year are eligible, as are single poems nominated by journal editors or prize organisers. Each year, works shortlisted for the prizes – plus those highly commended by the judges – are collected in the Forward Book of Poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Ellen Kocher</span> American poet (born 1965)

Ruth Ellen Kocher is an American poet. She is the recipient of the PEN/Open Book Award, the Dorset Prize, the Green Rose Prize, and the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado - Boulder where and serves as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natasha Trethewey</span> American poet

Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amanda Johnston</span> American poet

Amanda Johnston is an African-American poet. She was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and currently resides in Round Rock/Austin, Texas. Amanda Johnston received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, executive director and founder of Torch Literary Arts, and cofounder of #BlackPoetsSpeakOut.

Toi Derricotte is an American poet. She is the author of six poetry collections and a literary memoir. She has won numerous literary awards, including the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. From 2012–2017, Derricotte served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a professor emerita in writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Derricotte is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Seibles</span> American poet (born 1955)

Tim Seibles is an American poet, professor and the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems. His honors include an Open Voice Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In 2012 he was nominated for a National Book Award, for Fast Animal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Camille Dungy</span> American writer

Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shara McCallum</span> American poet

Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four collections of poems, including Madwoman, which won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.

Cave Canem Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States. It is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Ladan Osman is a Somali-American poet and teacher. Her poetry is centered on her Somali and Muslim heritage, and has been published in a number of prominent literary magazines. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for her collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geffrey Davis</span> American poet

Geffrey Davis is an American poet and professor. He is the author of Revising the Storm (2014) and Night Angler (2019). He teaches in The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He also serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Bianca Lynne Spriggs is an American poet and multidisciplinary artist born in Milwaukee, WI. While widely considered a born-and-bred Kentuckian, she actually moved around a lot due to the nature of her parents' work. For several years of her childhood, she would bounce around from Florida, Indiana, and Milwaukee. She moved to Kentucky when she was eleven years old and lived there the longest. She currently resides in Athens, OH where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. As a second generation Affrilachian Poet, she is the author of Kaffir Lily, How Swallowtails Become Dragons, The Galaxy is a Dance Floor, and Call Her By Her Name. She is the editor of The Swallowtale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women (2012), and co-editor of the anthologies, Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women, Undead: A Poetry Anthology of Ghouls, Ghosts, and More, and Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets(University of Kentucky Press, 2018).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Coste Lewis</span> American poet

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection "A masterpiece", "Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle", "remarkable hopefulness ... in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse", "formally polished, emotionally raw, and wholly exquisite". Voyage of the Sable Venus was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, and the California Book Award. The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzz Feed, and Entropy Magazine all named Voyage one of the best poetry collections of the year. Flavorwire named the collection one of the 10 must-read books about art. And Literary Hub named Voyage one of the "Most Important Books of the Last Twenty Years". In 2018, MoMA commissioned both Lewis and Kevin Young to write a series of poems to accompany Robert Rauschenberg's drawings in the book Thirty-Four Illustrations of Dante's Inferno. Lewis is also the author of Inhabitants and Visitors, a chapbook published by Clockshop and the Huntington Library and Museum. Her next book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was published by Knopf in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morgan Parker (writer)</span> American poet

Morgan Parker is an American poet, novelist, and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also author of the young adult novel, Who Put This Song On. She has been described as a "multidisciplinary phenom" for her diverse body of work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Jackson (poet)</span> American educator and poet

Gary Jackson is an American educator and poet. He had received a Cave Canem and Bread Loaf fellowship and was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2009.

Kristiana Rae Colón is an American poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-founder of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. She was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall. Her plays have premiered in Chicago, New York, London, and other cities. Colón is the author of several plays and poems. She earned the 2013 Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. Her play, Octagon, won Colón the Arizona Theatre Company 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award. Kristiana's writing, producing, and organizing work to radically reimagine power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation.

Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shayla Lawson</span> American poet

Shayla Lawson is an American poet and writer, currently the writer in residence at Amherst College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tommye Blount</span> American poet

Tommye Blount is a Black, queer poet from Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of the poetry collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue and the chapbook What Are We Not For. Fantasia for the Man in Blue was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry.

References

  1. 1 2 "Nicole Sealey | Forward Prizes Alumni". Forward Arts Foundation. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Nicole Sealey". Poets.org . Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  3. ↑ "Nicole Sealey Appointed Cave Canem Foundation Executive Director". Cave Canem Foundation. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  4. ↑ Willingham, Katie (August 30, 2018). "Poetry is hope: A Conversation with Nicole Sealey". The Adroit Journal . Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  5. ↑ Bayley, Sian (25 October 2021). "Kennard, Femi and Sealey win Forward Prizes for Poetry". The Bookseller . Retrieved 25 October 2021.
  6. 1 2 "Nicole Sealey". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved November 25, 2022.
  7. ↑ "Nicole Sealey In conversation with Forward Arts Foundation". Forward Arts Foundation. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  8. ↑ Kane, Lauren (February 22, 2018). "Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey". The Paris Review . Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  9. ↑ "Nicole Sealey". The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. June 2021. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  10. ↑ "Department of Justice Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation Into the Shooting Death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson" (PDF). United States Department of Justice. March 4, 2015. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  11. ↑ Sealey, Nicole (Spring 2021). "Pages 22–29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure". Poetry London. No. 98. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  12. ↑ "Forward Prizes for Poetry Winners Announced". Forward Arts Foundation. Retrieved October 25, 2021.
  13. ↑ Flood, Alison (October 24, 2021). "Luke Kennard wins Forward poetry prize for 'anarchic' response to Shakespeare". The Guardian .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.