Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. An excerpt from her forthcoming collection, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her honors include a Rome Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.