Sequoia Maner (NHC Fellow, 2023–24)

Sequoia Maner is assistant professor of English at Spelman College where she teaches classes related to African American literature and culture. She serves as secretary on the Board of Directors of TORCH Literary Arts, a nonprofit organization for Black women writers, and is a mentor with PEN America’s Incarcerated Writers Bureau (IWB). She is a poetry fellow of The Watering Hole and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. At the National Humanities Center, Maner is writing a scholarly monograph titled A Critical History of Black Elegy in the United States, 1773–2023. She is also at work on an untitled poetry manuscript about the foster care system in Los Angeles.

Maner is author of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (33 1/3 series, Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022) and the prize-winning chapbook Little Girl Blue: Poems (Host Publications, 2021). She is coauthor of the book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2019). Her poems, essays, and reviews can be found in venues such as Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, The Feminist Wire, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere.

Selected Publications

• ​​Maner, Sequoia. To Pimp A Butterfly. 33 1/3. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
• Maner, Sequoia. Little Girl Blue: Poems. Austin, TX: Host Publications, 2021.
• Austin, Tiffany, Sequoia Maner, Emily Ruth Rutter, and darlene anita scot, eds. Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Maner, Sequoia. “Anatomizing the Body, Diagnosing the Country: Reading the Elegies of Patricia Smith.” In Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, edited by Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, Emily Ruth Rutter, and darlene anita scott, 138–54. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Maner, Sequoia. “‘Where Do You Go When You Go Quiet?’: The Ethics of Interiority in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Beyoncé.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 17, no. 1 (September 2018): 184–204.