Vievee Francis

Vievee Francis was born in West Texas. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year.

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).

The poet Adrian Matejka describes her poems as “revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history.” Of her own poetry, Francis says, “I’m very much saying that how African American women are defined is inhuman in its narrowness, and that I, for one, am not going to allow it.”

Francis’s honors include the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation, Francis teaches poetry and poetics at Dartmouth College.