In her long-awaited second book, Robin Coste Lewis invites readers into an intimate manipulation, conspiring with a multiplicity of pasts and historical vision that expand Black life–both as experience and concept.
Robin Coste Lewis was born in Compton, California. She received a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California, an MFA in creative writing from New York University, an MTS from the Divinity School at Harvard University and has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, and Hampshire College. The recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and the writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, she served as the 2019–2022 poet laureate of Los Angeles. Coste Lewis is the author of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Alfred A. Knopf) and Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf), winner of the National Book Award in Poetry.