Hard Hat Reading: Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey reads “Conditions for a Southern Gothic,” from Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis, plus her own poem “Imagine Sisyphus Happy,” from Ordinary Beast.

Nicole Sealey—poet and Poets House Board Member—is the author of The Ferguson Report (Penguin Random House, 2023), and Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Sealey’s chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. In 2019, Sealey was named a 2019-2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Forward Foundation, CantoMundo, Cave Canem Foundation, the National Endowment and New York Foundation for the Arts, an Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. She was the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017–2019. Sealey lives in Brooklyn, New York.