The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey began making erasures from the US Department of Justices 2015 report detailing bias policing and court practices in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, three years after the murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police. She revisits that investigation in an act of erasure that reimagines the entire original text as it strips it away.

Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure comes to us first in fragments – at times not even syllables, ah or id – but as a feeling, the unsayable constructing itself as we read along or listenThe paced rhythm is almost painfully made as if fleshy blips on the heart meter – a ghostly master text beneath. One feels subliminal truths cumulate out of a visceral engagement, and then the emergence of eight inspired poems.

-- Yusef Komunyakaa

Nicole Sealey was born in St Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, US, 2017; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023), which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Alfred A. Knopf, US, & Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023). Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize.

Excerpts from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Poetry London, while ‘Pages 22-29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021.

Sealey’s honours include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Sealey served as the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017 to 2019. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

In 2017, she started The Sealey Challenge, an annual online community challenge to read one book of poetry each day for the month of August.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781780376639
ISBN 10	1780376634
Title	The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
Author	Nicole Sealey
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Year published	2023-09-21
Number of pages	144
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.