Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2024-2026 Princeton Arts Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Poetry London. She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University. For bookings please contact Anya Backlund at Blue Flower Arts.

“The paced rhythm is almost painfully made as if fleshy blips on the heart meter—a ghostly master text beneath.”

—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021

“Though these poems are attuned to their own devastation, they continue unapologetically with their own aspirations.”

—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

“Nothing ordinary here. But beast? Yeah, that’s it. This thing has teeth.”

—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

“Nicole Sealey is a poet for the ages, and this is a stunning debut.”

—Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars

“These are poems of thrilling sonic and syntactical play, formal dexterity, mythmaking, and delight in the ordinary rendered strange by new juxtapositions.”

—Natasha Trethewey, author of Native Guard

Books

Poetry

The New Yorker
“Pages 65-77, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure”

The Atlantic
“Pages 50-64, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure”

The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series
“In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’”

American Poetry Review
“Object Permanence”

Literary Hub
“The First Person Who Will Live to Be 150 Years Old Has Already Been Born”

Narrative
“Hysterical Strength”

The New York Times
“Even the Gods”

PEN America
“Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’”

Who among us/is stunned by how fast rain/pours from the sky? Stunned/by how the sky, clear at first,/self-corrects, as if to say, “I mean/this, not that. That, not this.

—from “Pages 22-29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure,” which appeared in Literary Imagination, July 2021

Every thing aspires to one/degradation or another. I want/to learn how to make something/holy, then walk away.

—from “In Igboland,” which appeared in American Poetry Review, March/April 2005

As if god, despite his compulsions, were decent/and hadn’t the tendency to throw off/all appearance of decorum, here I am/admiring this single violet orchid.

—from “Heretofore Unuttered,” which appeared in No Tokens, August 2017

News

2024-2026 Princeton Arts Fellowship

Fall 2023 Café Royal Cultural Foundation Grantee

2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship

2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem

2021 NEA Literature Creative Writing Fellowship

2021 Granum Foundation Prize

2020 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship

2019-2020 Rome Prize

2019-2020 Princeton Hodder Fellowship