Vievee Francis

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (NorthwesternUniversity Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Forthcoming: memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies including Poetry, Best American Poetry, spin.com, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Born in West Texas, raised in Metropolitan Detroit, Francis with composer Jonathan Berger, and artist Enrico Riley and wrote the libretto for the  transdisciplinary opera, The Ritual of Breath.  She received the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and has also been a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and Kresge Fellowship. Part of The Detroit School, she is a Cave Canem participant, and served as a facilitator for the Callaloo Writing Workshops (USA, UK, Barbados). She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.