The WriteAngles conference planning committee is delighted to announce that Shanta Lee will be the recipient of the second Abel Meeropol Social Justice Writing Award. Shanta Lee will accept the award at the April 6, 2024 conference, where she will give the keynote address.
Shanta Lee is a writer across genres, a visual artist, and public intellectual. She was the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and a gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council Board of Directors.
Her 2023 illustrated poetry collection, illustrated by Alan Blackwell, Black Metamorphoses explores the Black psyche, body, soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization in what she calls a conversation, interpretation, and interrogation of Ovid. It was a finalist for the Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the Cowles Poetry Book Prize and longlisted for the Idaho Poetry Prize. GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues won the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. A chapbook, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter (Harbor Editions), is forthcoming.
Shanta Lee’s professional interests have included public health, arts, local government, non-profit and other sectors. She was a Vermont Public producer and reporter creating a series, “Seeing … the Unseen and In-Between within Vermont’s Landscape,” and is a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine and Art New England. She lectures on the life of Lucy Terry Prince, the first known African American poet in English literature, and on the intersections between human identity and the monster figure.
Lee has published poems, essays, literary critiques, interviews, visual art, and translations in Harper’s Magazine, ITERANT, CARVE magazine, Palette Poetry, DAME magazine, The Crisis magazine, Ms. Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Literary Mama, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and a Women, Gender and Sexuality undergraduate degree from Trinity College. To learn more about Shanta Lee visit her website at Shantalee.com
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