Vievee Francis
“Sometimes, one’s life depends upon the telling. To write is to speak, to give textual voice to, and I have found that when I speak up, just as I often find inspiration to speak through what others have said or written, I may inspire others to do the same.”
“Whether following her through the landscapes in which she’s lived or the landscapes of one’s interior, Vievee Francis’s bottomless imagination continues to surprise in Forest Primeval. Who wouldn’t follow her as ‘her eyes scan the horizon for the promise of more,’ when she offers so much more here than a turn of a phrase; these poems build a world we all want to inhabit, even when times are tough, and they recall a world we’ve survived enough to celebrate in a manner that’s both dignified and primal like “eloquent tambourines” on a Sunday morning.”
“An electrifying portrait of danger and hardship in a mostly rural-landscape in West Texas.”
“Blue-Tail Fly tells the stories of freed slaves, Vievee [Francis’] ancestors and Civil War soldiers. Now in its second printing, it was hailed as one of the best poetry books of 2006 by Poets & Writers magazine.”
Poet Vievee Francis is the author of The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts 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). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
Discussing the role of poetry in her life with Ms. Magazine, Francis noted, “In my life poetry does not provide “healing” but it does allow for expression and it markedly demonstrates that I cannot be silenced. I explore my interior and I relate it. Black women aren’t encouraged to do that. We are encouraged, even among progressives, to tow certain lines. My eccentricities don’t allow for that.”
Born in West Texas, she earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
Open and right-click to download
(c) Matthew Olzmann
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
