bio.

Niki Herd is the author of the poetry collection The Language of Shedding Skin and co-editor with Meg Day of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, named one of 2019’s “hidden gems” by Ms. Magazine. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism, appear in or are forthcoming from Pleiades, Action, Spectacle, New England Review, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Copper Nickel, the Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Obsidian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. Her poems have been anthologized in This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta!, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.

Herd’s work has been supported by MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Newberry Library, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem, as well as the DC Commission on the Arts. She has presented lectures and taught workshops at Carlow University, Community College of Baltimore County, Writers-in-the-Schools, and Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston and currently lives in St. Louis where she is a Visiting Writer in Residence at Washington University.