Chet’la Sebree, the 2021 Boutelle-Day Poet-in-Residence at Smith College, is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Field Study (FSG Originals, 2021), a genre-defying book that employs Tweets, quotations from Black visionaries, pop-cultural references, and other prose fragments to interrogate race, racism, desire, and Black womanhood. In his award citation for the book’s James Laughlin Award, Rick Barot described Field Study as “a lyric reckoning of extraordinary candor,” and “a work of fierce intensity and engulfment.” Charis Books writes that Sebree “makes meaning out of messiness and malaise, breathing life into a scientific study like no other.” Sebree is also the author of Mistress (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2019) selected as the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry. Sebree is the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts and an assistant professor at Bucknell University.
