Photograph by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
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 a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in 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 Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she 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, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. 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
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
“Nicole Sealey is one of today’s most interesting poets... she steers us on a fantastic voyage through her infinitely brilliant mind.”
—Essence Magazine
“Quietly profound, Sealey’s first collected work flows with an avid heart and mind through questions of love, inheritance, friendship, and family—things that sustain us from one day to the next, made more precious by their fragility.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
Reviews & Interviews
LitHub
Toward Black Wonder: How Nicole Sealey Makes Erasure a New Way of Seeing
Poets & Writers
Rethinking Erasure: A Q&A with Nicole Sealey
The Paris Review
Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey
Publisher's Weekly
Review of ORDINARY BEAST
Shondaland
Nicole Sealey is No 'Ordinary Beast' (or Poet)
News
“These poems are marvels that should be read, re-read, and read aloud to others.”
—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
“Ordinary Beast is that rare poetry debut that possesses all the assurance and wisdom of a masterful mid-career book.”
—Craig Teicher, author of Welcome to Sonnetville
“With this book, Nicole Sealey has redefined the genre and shown is what the form can do when the cruelty of silence is transformed into poetry.”
—Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon
“The Ferguson Report: An Erasure illuminates truths of our fraught time and seeks radical possibilities within all-too-familiar narratives.”
—Kevin Young, author of Stones
12 November 2024
Reading with John Murillo
Smith College
10 Elm Street
Northampton, MA
Events
21 November 2024
Reading & Conversation
The Dalton School
108 East 89th Street
New York, NY
10-13 April 2025
Festival Appearances
VI Literary Festival & Book Fair
St. Croix, U.S.V.I.
16-18 October 2025
Festival Appearances
Sharon Springs Poetry Festival
Sharon Springs, NY
16-27 March 2026
Poetry Reading
Banff Centre for the Arts & Creativity
Banff National Park
Alberta, CANADA