Shanta Lee

Shanta Lee is the author of GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues (Diode Editions, 2021). She was named the 2021 Vermont Book Award winner, won the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize, and earned an honorable mention from the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her collection Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) is what Lee describes as “A 2000+ year old phone line opened to Ovid as well as an interrogation of the Greek mythos while creating my own new language in this work.” Black Metamorphoses is an illustrated poetry collection longlisted for the 2021 Idaho Poetry Prize and the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize and named a finalist for the 2021 Hudson Prize.

Lee has won an Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and in 2020 was the gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council’s board of directors. She has also received a number of New England Newspaper & Press Association (NENPA) awards for her investigative journalism pieces. She has published poems, essays, literary critiques, and interviews in ITERANT, Art New England, CARVE magazine, Palette Poetry, Blavity, DAME magazine, The Crisis magazine, Vermont Public Radio, Ms. Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Literary Mama, among others.

Lee is also a multidisciplinary artist who works in different mediums, including photography. Her current exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, has been shown at the Southern Vermont Arts Center and at the Fleming Museum of Art. Lee currently lives in Vermont and lectures on the life of Lucy Terry Prince (c. 1730–1821)—considered the first known African American poet in English literature—as a member of the Vermont and New Hampshire Humanities Council Speakers Bureaus.