Evie Shockley is the author, most recently, of suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Lannan Literary Award in recognition of the body of her work. She teaches in Black literary and cultural studies, Black feminist thought, and contemporary poetry and poetics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English.
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Evie Shockley Introduces Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson’s debut collection, Black Pastoral, has seeded my psyche with its lush and thorny language. The poems it contains taught me to read its title with the irony due […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
before the union rally
on the campus green, a loose cloud of onlookers collects around a bloody tableau :: hunter and kill, strange in this scene,where some students in spring can still afford to […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2022
the lost track of time
now that i’m on this track, i can’t find my way back to the main drag. in the middle of 2020, i carelessly drifted off onto a street not quite […]
Of Today
Jan/Feb 2020
can’t unsee
the eye is a tool. it takes available light and makes notes to self about shape, distance, mood. the self — brain? mind? soul? — accumulates and cross- references these observations with info from […]
May/June 2022
nature studies
first, it was a short piece of lupine, passed around the group, for us to smell its intoxicating wine. then, the toxic corn lily, from which he peeled leaf after […]