BIOGRAPHY

Shayla Lawz is a fiction writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ, working at the intersection of text, sound, and performance. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden, and The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) where she was the 2024 Dream Space Resident. She has served as the inaugural writer-in-residence at The Hurston/Wright Foundation and has been a visiting writer at The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Rutgers University, and Brown University where she received her MFA in fiction. Her writing and sound work appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Poetry Foundation, Catapult, and Obsidian, among others. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Slowdown, and NPR’s On the Record. She lives in Brooklyn where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

Instagram: @shaylalawz

Twitter: @shaylalawz