Vixen

Originally from Los Angeles, Cherene Sherrard is a poet, scholar, and essayist. She is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her creative writing and research explores the nuanced and multifaceted aspects of black life in the diaspora. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (2007), Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (2011), and the editor of a Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. She is the author of the poetry collections, Vixen and Grimoire. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant and poetry fellowships to Ragdale and Sewanee Writer’s Conference.

"Each page is unexpected, with a fresh view, meeting someone new, filled with poetic change and intrigue. These poems are edgy; and yet smooth, and strong, as silk." —Washington Independent Review of Books "Cherene Sherrard’s Vixen is one of the most stunning debut collections of recent years. Historically resonant and urgently contemporary, Cherene Sherrard’s work interrogates the raw, shifting, and corrosive narratives of racial identity that her poems unravel in multiple cultural iterations. Her speakers are dazzling and her lines crackle with her powerful and incisive intelligence. Vixen is a book I keep returning to again and again for both its wisdom and its passionate dramatic brilliance." —David St. John "Vixen is a sharp knife elegantly sheathed in velvet, leather, and lace. What I mean is: the language is precise and pointed; the poetry’s graceful forms contain superb surprises; and the lives that take shape in Cherene Sherrard’s skilled and generous hands are richly textured, gorgeously various. Every word a sensation, every line a hard-earned luxury: this book leads us away from safety into worlds that black women learn to navigate through vexatious, merciless experience. Follow Sherrard into vixen country and get versed in its 'iridescent mayhem.'" —Evie Shockley "How does a woman reimagine the world and cast herself anew in it? Vixen prompts such reconsideration—beginning with its title. How one feels and how one is pressured to feel frequently compete with one another. Sherrard gives voice to a much-needed resistance. Her poems quietly amass their humor, affections and preoccupation with film, music, history—and the loveliest textures and colors. What a multifarious gathering of voices in this book. They don’t compete so much as question. We are all the better for hearing them." —Yona Harvey