Born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, raised in Apopka, Florida, and now living in New York City, Nicole Sealey (she/her/hers) is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her recent honors include the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, the 2021 Granum Foundation Prize, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She also received a 2018 Jerome Travel and Study grant and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Project.

During her residency, Sealey plans to continue her exploration of complicated racial histories, working on talking out of turn: notes from the field, intimate recollections of her experiences as a Black woman poet and arts administrator navigating the literary world, and Ferguson Report: An Erasure, a book-length poem lifted from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Ferguson report, which details bias policing and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri. The Camargo residency will offer her the opportunity for multidisciplinary exchange, raising new questions in her own work and finding new tools for solving existing problems.

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.