Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet known for her book, Voyage of the Sable Venus.

Biography

Lewis was born in Compton, California.[1] She obtained an MFA from New York University and attended graduate school at Harvard Divinity School, where she received a master's degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature.[1][2] Lewis was a professor at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the New York University Low-Residency MFA in Paris.[3] She began writing poetry after a traumatic brain injury limited her writing to a single sentence each day.[4] Lewis is in the Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. She has a fellowship in Poetry and Visual Studies.

Writing

Her first book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus[1][5] won the National Book Award for poetry.[6] The New York Times described it as "a taut book of responses to lunatic cultural ideas" and contained a "thrilling centerpiece," the title poem, 79 pages long.[1]

According to Lewis, she obtained the idea for the book title from Thomas Stothard's engraving The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies.[5] Lewis describes the book as "about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive." [4]

Lewis's work has been published in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, and Transition.[3][7][8][9]

Bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Garner, Dwight (1 December 2015). "Speaking 'Blackly,' in Artful Strokes of Provocation". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  2. ↑ "2015 National Book Award Winner, Poetry". National Book Foundation. 2015. Retrieved 15 December 2015.
  3. 1 2 Coste Lewis, Robin (2015). "The Ark". Transition. 115: 102–135.
  4. 1 2 Isokawa, Dana (2016). "Fractures through time: our eleventh annual look at debut poets". Poets & Writers. 44 (1): 74. Retrieved 24 February 2016.
  5. 1 2 Chiasson, Dan (19 October 2015). "Rebirth of Venus Robin Coste Lewis's historical art.". New Yorker. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  6. ↑ Deshpande, Ray. "Robin Coste Lewis' National Book Award Marks a Shift in How the Literary World Regards Black Poets". Slate. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  7. ↑ Coste Lewis, Robin (Summer 2000). "Back Matter". The Massachusetts Review. Massachusetts Review, Inc. 41 (2). JSTOR 25091665.
  8. ↑ Coste Lewis, Robin (Spring 2008). "Verga". Callaloo. Johns Hopkins University Press. 31 (2): 389. JSTOR 27654808.
  9. ↑ Coste Lewis, Robin (2012). "Poems from Sanctuary". Transition. 109: 33–42.


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