Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet known for her book, Voyage of the Sable Venus, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.[1]

Biography

Lewis was born in Compton, California.[2] 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.[2][3] Lewis was a professor at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the New York University Low-Residency MFA in Paris.[4] She began writing poetry after a traumatic brain injury limited her writing to a single sentence each day.[5] Lewis is in the Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. She has a fellowship in Poetry and Visual Studies.

On 27 April 2017, Mayor Eric Garcetti named Robin Coste Lewis the new Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. https://www.lamayor.org/mayor-eric-garcetti-names-robin-coste-lewis-poet-laureate-los-angeles

Writing

Her first book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus[2][6] won the National Book Award for poetry.[7] 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.[2]

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.[6] Lewis describes the book as "about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive." [5]

Lewis's work has been published in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, and Transition.[4][8][9][10]

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2015_p_lewis.html#.WIjUyVMrKUk
  2. 1 2 3 4 Garner, Dwight (1 December 2015). "Speaking 'Blackly,' in Artful Strokes of Provocation". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  3. ↑ "2015 National Book Award Winner, Poetry". National Book Foundation. 2015. Retrieved 15 December 2015.
  4. 1 2 Coste Lewis, Robin (2015). "The Ark". Transition. 115: 102–135.
  5. 1 2 Isokawa, Dana (2016). "Fractures through time: our eleventh annual look at debut poets". Poets & Writers. 44 (1): 74. Retrieved 24 February 2016.
  6. 1 2 Chiasson, Dan (19 October 2015). "Rebirth of Venus Robin Coste Lewis’s historical art.". New Yorker. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  7. ↑ Deshpande, Ray. "Robin Coste Lewis’ National Book Award Marks a Shift in How the Literary World Regards Black Poets". Slate. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
  8. ↑ Coste Lewis, Robin (Summer 2000). "Back Matter". The Massachusetts Review. Massachusetts Review, Inc. 41 (2). JSTOR 25091665.
  9. ↑ Coste Lewis, Robin (Spring 2008). "Verga". Callaloo. Johns Hopkins University Press. 31 (2): 389. JSTOR 27654808.
  10. ↑ Coste Lewis, Robin (2012). "Poems from Sanctuary". Transition. 109: 33–42.


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