Biography
Bernard Ferguson (he/him and they/them) is a Bahamian poet, essayist and MFA candidate at New York University. Winner of the 2019 92y Discovery Contest, he was also awarded Hurston Wright Foundation poetry prize that year for his series, “Notes on Migration.” Ferguson’s poetry—immediate, associative, and musical, influenced by slam—has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and anthologized in the Best New Poets anthology series. “Anything that subverts masculinity,” Ferguson says, intrigues him, and he “wants to flood the world” with poems about “men just really sitting in nature and considering hydrangeas or something.” Poetic subjects he engages range widely, from masculinities to slavery to getting a haircut to the natural world. Ferguson is working on a nonfiction book about Hurricane Dorian and the climate crisis. Born in Nassau, he lives in Brooklyn.