Biography of Evie Shockley

Evie Shockley is an American poet. Shockley received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry for her book the new black and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

Early life

Shockley is originally from Nashville, Tennessee. Shockley received a BA from Northwestern University, studied law at the University of Michigan, and received and a PhD in English from Duke University.

Career

Shockley teaches at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in New Jersey. She published the book Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry in 2011. The book explores the poetics of the Black Arts Movement.


She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow since 2013.

Publications

• The Gorgon Goddess (Carolina Wren Press, 2001)
• a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006)
• 31 words * prose poems (Belladonna* Books, 2007)
• the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011, 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry)
• semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)