Somewhere between Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets belongs Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study: a genre-bending exploration of black womanhood and desire, written as a lyrical, surprisingly humorous, and startlingly vulnerable prose poem

Chet'la Sebree is the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University and the author of Mistress, winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2019. She earned an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University, and has received fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, and Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. Her poetry has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Guernica, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her first collection won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her second was a finalist for The Aspen Prize, The Story Prize, The Chautauqua Prize, and The Los Angeles Times Book prize for fiction. She is the 2021 winner of The New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Field Study with Chet'la Sebree in conversation with Danielle Evans