Residence Lexington, Kentucky Books Kaffir Lily Role Poet | Name Bianca Spriggs Occupation Poet | |
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Born 1981 (age 33-34) Milwaukee, Wisconsin Notable work Kaffir Lily, How Swallowtails Become Dragons | ||
Bianca spriggs poetry reading
Bianca Lynne Spriggs is a black American poet and multidisciplinary artist born in Milwaukee, WI, in 1981. She currently resides in Lexington, Kentucky. An Affrilachian Poet, she is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications, 2010), How Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing, 2011), The Galaxy is a Dance Floor (Argos Books, 2016), and Call Her By Her Name (Northwestern University Press, 2016). She is the editor of The Swallowtale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women (2012), and the co-editor of the anthologies, Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women (Accent's Publishing, 2015), and Undead: A Poetry Anthology of Ghouls, Ghosts, and More (Apex Publications, 2016). She is the Managing Editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and the Poetry Editor for Apex Magazine.
Contents
- Bianca spriggs poetry reading
- Cave canem at the new school r erica doyle bertram bianca spriggs and marcus wicker
- Education
- Awards
- References
Spriggs' work focuses on the connection between art and community and the identity of black women in the American South. From 2006 to 2012, she was the creator and artistic director of the annual Gypsy Poetry Slam at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. In 2013, her poem "The ________ of the Universe: A Love Story" was tattooed onto 248 residents of Lexington as part of the Lexington Tattoo Project. Also in 2013, at Transylvania University's Morlan Gallery, she collaborated with videographer Angel Clark to curate the multimedia exhibit "The Thirteen," which memorialized 13 black women who were lynched or killed in Kentucky. She was featured on the track "Hypnopomp (Epilogue)" in CunninLynguists' 2011 album Oneirology.
Her passion for poetry sprouted from the visual arts, once she found solace in writing poems and stories. Her writing evolved into a career once she applied to be a writer for the Kentucky Foundation for Women and decided to pursue this practice as a full-time job. Her inspiration comes from her love for storytelling: "Sometimes writing is telling my own story through (other people), and sometimes, it’s telling their stories through my own."
Cave canem at the new school r erica doyle bertram bianca spriggs and marcus wicker
Education
Spriggs graduated from Transylvania University in 2003 with a degree in history and a minor in studio art. She received her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2005 and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Kentucky.
Awards
Spriggs is a 2013 recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recipient of five Artist Enrichment Grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, including an Arts Meets Activism grant. She was also named one of the Top 30 Black Performance Poets in the U.S. by TheRoot.com. She was the recipient of the 2016 Sallie Bingham Award for feminist expression in the arts. She was also a Cave Canem Fellow in 2006, 2007, and 2010.