Vievee Francis

Vievee Elaure Francis (/vaɪˈviː/) is an American poet. She is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year. She is the author of three collections of the poetry, the third of which, Forest Primeval, won the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry^[1] and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts (Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards) poetry award.^[2]

Personal life

Francis is a native of Texas.^[3] She lived and worked in Detroit, Michigan for fifteen years where she was instrumental in fostering a literary community for youth, young-adult and adult poets.^[4] From there, she moved to Swannanoa, North Carolina while teaching at Warren Wilson College (undergraduate) and eventually North Carolina State University.^[5] Francis is married to poet Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines (Alice James Press) and Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Press) a native of Detroit.^[6]

Career

Francis teaches English and writes poetry at Dartmouth College. She is also an associate editor of Callaloo (journal), and a faculty member at the 2018 Conference on Poetry at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH. Prior to joining Dartmouth, she taught writing and poetry at North Carolina State University among other colleges and universities.

Awards

Writing for the judging committee for the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine praised Forest Primeval as “an intense work, dark … Dantean … dreamlike in its visions.... Francis is reclaiming modernist and feminist legacies of poetry, and it takes great courage to do that.”^[7]

References