Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis is the former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Her service as Poet Laureate of Los Angeles focused on truth and reconciliation projects dealing with the city’s history. Her poetry debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015) was honored with the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry—the first poetry debut to do so since 1975, and the first debut to win in poetry by an African American.

Voyage of the Sable Venus is a meditation on the black female figure through time. In the center of the collection is the title poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. The collection presents a new understanding of biography and self and is a thrilling testament to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.

Her next book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, is a genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration to change the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure. To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness is the winner of the NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection.

Lewis is a Cave Canem fellow, a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and a Ford Foundation Art of Change fellow. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard University’s Divinity School, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. A finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Hurston/Wright Award, as well as the International War Poetry Prize, Lewis has published her work widely in various journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among others. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Currently, she is a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Southern California and a 2019 Guggenheim fellow. Born in Compton, California, her family is from New Orleans.