Vievee Francis

Vievee Francis is the author of five books of poetry Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark, Forest Primeval, The Shared World, and the forthcoming Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. Her most recent work is a libretto. Born in impoverished West Texas during the Jim Crow era, she is at work on a memoir, Ugly, an account of family and racial/cultural standards of beauty that found her inherently unfeminine, unwomanly, and ugly, and its implications for black women's body image.

Francis' many honors and awards include the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Kingsley-Tufts Award, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Harvard Review, Best American Poetry, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Francis has served as an Associate Editor for Callaloo and currently teaches poetry writing and poetics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing.