Valencia Robin
Photo by Jennifer Walkowiak
Bio
Valencia Robin is a poet and visual artist. Her first collection of poems, Ridiculous Light, won Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of 2019. Other honors include fellowships from the University of Virginia, Cave Canem, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Bennington College. Her poems have been published by the Boston Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, the New York Times, Black Renaissance Noire, St. Petersburg Review, Foundry, TriQuarterly,and elsewhere. A co-director of the UVA Young Writers Workshop and a co-founder of GalleryDAAS at the University of Michigan, she holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia and an MFA in art and design from the University of Michigan.
Having left my job and my community with the dream of becoming a working poet, I can’t begin to say how much this award means to me. To join artists of every stripe who have been honored by the National Endowment of the Arts, to be told through this fellowship that my poems have a place in American poetry, to be given permission to keep taking chances despite not having anything close to a net—this fellowship validates all of that. Thanks to the NEA’s support, I can complete my second poetry collection without the fear and uncertainty that I’ve learned to live with, I can continue to use my poetry to capture the ordinary, yet extraordinary people who got me here and to create space for others. For this I am wildly grateful.