Craft Talk with Vievee Francis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry including The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023), winner of the Vermont Book Award; and Forest Primeval (Northwestern University Press, 2015), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. She co-wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath. Forthcoming are her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead, and a memoir, Ugly, an account of family and racial/cultural standards of beauty and their implications for black women's body image. Her work has been honored with a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award. Born in West Texas and raised in the Detroit area, she lives in Vermont and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.