Nicole Sealey was born in St Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, US, 2017; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023), which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Alfred A. Knopf, US, & Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023). Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize.
Excerpts from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Poetry London, while ‘Pages 22-29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021.
Her latest publication – edited with John Murillo – is the anthology Dear Yusuf: Essays, Letters, and Poems, for and about One Mr Yusuf Komunyakaa (Wesleyan University Press, 2024).
Sealey’s honours include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Sealey served as the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017 to 2019. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.
In 2017, she started The Sealey Challenge, an annual online community challenge to read one book of poetry each day for the month of August.
Author photo: Michael Lionstar
Author website: https://www.nicolesealey.com
