Evie Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Evie Shockley is the author of three books of poetry: a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2005); the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry; and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), which also won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. Her publications additionally include a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011), and essays and poems appearing in the U.S. and internationally. Among her honors are the Lannan Literary Award, Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the American Council of Learned Societies.