Vievee Francis

Vievee Elaure Francis was born in West Texas. She earned her BA from Fisk University and her MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009. She won the Rona Jaffe Award in the same year.

Francis is the author of four poetry collections: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly, 2023); Forest Primeval (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly, 2015), winner of both the Kingsley Tufts Award and Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize (now, the Angela Jackson Prize); and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006).

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 is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.