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Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she directs the creative writing program. Her six collections of poetry include suddenly we (Wesleyan, 2023), and Semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). Her poetry and scholarship have appeared in The 1619 Project, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The LA Review of Books, LitHub, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Honors for her body of poetry include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize.