Dante Micheaux

Dante Micheaux is the author of Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010), and of Circus (Indolent Books, 2018), which was awarded the Four Quartets Prize in 2019. His poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, PN Review, The African American Review and Tongue—among other journals and anthologies. He has been shortlisted for the Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize. Micheaux’s honors include a prize in poetry from the Vera List Center for Art & Politics, the Oscar Wilde Award and fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The New York Times Foundation.

About Dante Micheaux’s Circus, the judges of the 2019 Four Quartets Prize—Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Rosanna Warren—wrote: “How right that this poet’s first name should be Dante. For his Circus is a Comedy: a savage comedy, lacerating dialects, fingering wounds, looking for loves right and wrong in the crevices of history and of humiliated bodes. And yet, and yet. His language exults, triumphs, and freely rummages in the treasuries of the Bible, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, Baraka, and Mahalia Jackson, taking what it needs, making it his sovereign own, a wrested blessing. Congratulations, Dante Micheaux, on your astonishing Circus.“