Nicole Sealey
Visiting Poet
Born in St. Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey’s work explores themes of identity, heritage, racial injustice, and gender marginalization. Her work centers inquiry, and does so boldly, pushing form to convey the striations of emotional complexity that emerge when confronting cultural and historical narratives of violence against Black bodies. She is the author of the collection The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Knopf, 2023), a book that poet Yusef Komunyakaa praised for its visceral style: “[it] comes to us first in fragments—at times not even syllables, ah or id—but as a feeling, the unsayable constructing itself as we read along or listen…a ghostly master text beneath.” Excerpts have been featured in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Poetry London and in 2021 an excerpt, "Pages 22-29," won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), and her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), won the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. She is the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including the 2021 Granum Foundation Prize, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Sealey served as the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017–2019. She teaches in the M.F.A. Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.
Co-sponsored by the Lecture Committee, the Cromwell Day Committee, the Office for Equity and Inclusion, the Department of Africana Studies, the Department of English Language & Literature, the Program for the Study of Women & Gender, and the Archives Concentration.
Sealey will read with John Murillo at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at 7 p.m. Livestreams will be available on BDPC Facebook and YouTube pages.