Evie Shockley
Visiting Poet
Evie Shockley, whose latest collection suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) was named a National Book Award finalist, emerged from Nashville’s cultural landscape to become one of America’s most innovative poets, with a singular, distinctive voice that challenges traditional forms while building new ones.
Electric Literature hailed suddenly we as a “thrilling shapeshifter of a collection that is both a response and antidote to these times.” In Shockley’s words, suddenly we explores “how our understanding of ourselves as individuals interacts with, informs, limits, or opens up the ways we imagine ourselves in relation to others.” Responding to recent years’ watershed moments—from Black Lives Matter protests to the pandemic—her work, as Library Journal noted, “incorporates elements of myth without being patently ‘mythical’ and is personal without being self-indulgent, sentimental without being saccharine.”
Her earlier collections include semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Through her innovative approach to language and form, Shockley creates spaces where the personal and collective converge, inviting readers to reconsider not just what poetry says, but what it can do.
Now teaching African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Shockley continues receiving major recognition, including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the Lannan Literary Award.
Shockley will read at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 7 p.m. A livestream will be available on the BDPC YouTube page.