Craft Talk with Nicole Sealey

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards;  and The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Knopf, 2023), a New Yorker Book of the Year, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry. With poet John Murillo, she co-edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems for and about One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. The former executive director of the Cave Canem Foundation, she teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths