Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry and six collections of poetry, including suddenly we, semiautomatic, and the new black. Her poetry was twice awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her criticism also appears in The Black Scholar, New Literary History, Callaloo, The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, The New Emily Dickinson Studies, and other publications. Additional honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Stephen Henderson Award, and support from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, ACLS, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Shockley currently serves as an Editor at Contemporary Literature and is at work on a critical project tentatively titled Black Graphics: Colorblindness and the Survival of Black Being.
