Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She received an MFA from New York University and an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida.

Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), which won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award; Ordinary Beast (Ecco Press, 2017), a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize.

In 2024, Sealey was named a 2024–26 Princeton Arts Fellow at Princeton University. She has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the American Academy in Rome, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among other organizations.

Sealey served as executive director of the Cave Canem Foundation from 2017 to 2019 and was the curator for a special series of Poem-a-Day from August 31 to September 11, 2020. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.