Evie Shockley is the author of semiautomatic and the new black, both winners of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry; semiautomatic was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize.  Her publications include as well the critical study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry and poems and essays appearing recently and forthcoming in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Obsidian, The Black Scholar, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion, The New Emily Dickinson Studies, New Literary History, and the PoetryNow podcast series.  Among her honors are the 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. She is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.