WORD Presents Evie Shockley

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream—and work—toward a more capacious "we"

FREE Event. Limited Seating.

About the Book

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

About the author

 Poet & literary scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we, semiautomatic, and the new black.  Her work has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has appeared internationally.  Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award, and her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with like-minded artists working in various media.  Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. 

In conversation with

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017) and Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Granta and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.

Naomi Extra is a poet, writer, scholar, and cartoonist. In both her creative and scholarly work, she explores the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. You can find her work in places like the Boston Review, Zora, The New Yorker, The Lily, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches jazz poetry at Rutgers University, Newark.

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