Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey 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. Sealey’s 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 currently teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

And

–Nicole Sealey

Withstand pandemonium

and scandalous

nightstands

commanding candlelight

         and

         quicksand

and zinfandel

clandestine landmines

candy handfuls

and contraband

         and

         handmade

commandments

and merchandise

secondhand husbands

philandering

         and

         landless

and vandal

bandwagons slandered

and branded

handwritten reprimands

         and

         meander

on an island

landscaped with chandeliers

abandon handcuffs

standstills

         and

         backhands

notwithstanding

thousands of oleanders

and dandelions

handpicked

         and

         sandalwood

and mandrake

and random demands

the bystander

wanders

         in

         wonderland.

Published in Poetry (March, 2020).

Links

• Author’s website.
• “A Continuous Bloom | Nicole Sealey, Interviewed by Christie Sylvester.” The New York Review. 5 October, 2024.
• “Nicole Sealey with Mandana Chaffa.” The Brooklyn Rail. October 2023.
• “Ordinary Beast: NICOLE SEALEY with Alex Dueben.” The Brooklyn Rail. December/January 2017-2018.

Media

Poets Unite!: The Politics of Poetry Collectives | April 10, 2018