Evie Shockley is the author of semiautomatic (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. She has published four other collections of poetry—including the new black (2011), which won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011). Her honors include the 2015 Stephen Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an English Professor at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.