Biography
Robin Coste-Lewis thought she was going to be a novelist until an accident that caused permanent brain injury forced her into bed rest for two years. Her neurologist told her that she could only write and read one sentence a day. Spending 8 hours thinking of that one line, the power of poetry became clear to her. Her debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015) was the winner of the National Book Award in poetry and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) among other honours. When Robin was growing up she never read a black writer until college, a fact that still drives her today. The poems in Voyage of the Sable Venus center around bodies, art, and race and many embrace fantastical elements. Robin Coste-Lewis holds a PhD from the creative writing and literature program at the University of Southern California. She is the poet laureate of Los Angeles, California where she now resides.