Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). Her books have been recognized with a number of awards: the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize; and suddenly we won an NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the editor of the Norton Library edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Written by Herself), by Harriet Jacobs (2025). The title of her talk is "Black Graphics: Taking a Look at Gender."