Professor Francis Receives 2021 Aiken Taylor Award

The Department of English and Creative Writing is pleased to announce that Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing Vievee Francis has won the Sewanee Review's 2021 Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry. As part of this year's award celebration, poet Phillip B. Williams will present a lecture on Francis' poetry on October 12th, and Professor Francis will accept the award and give a reading from her work on October 13th at Sewanee (more details here).

Every year since 1987, the Sewanee Review has honored a distinguished poet in the maturity of their career with the Aiken Taylor Award. Francis joins other eminent poets who have received the award, including Henry Taylor, Billy Collins, Donald Hall, and Heather McHugh. "Vievee Francis is a poet whose work is suffused with abundance: of what emerges from earth, of stories told by those who live upon it, and of the ravages visited on the same, all shaped by a singular voice expressing the full range and intensity of human feeling," writes the Sewanee Review.

Professor Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection), and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, among others. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing here at Dartmouth.