The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Fall Literature Grant to Nicole Sealey for her project “talking out of turn”.

Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Poetry London. She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

talking out of turn is a collection of personal essays recounting my time as one of a few Black women senior-level literary arts professionals.

In the spring and summer of 2020, as protests kicked off and continued, institutions with complicated racial histories issued statements in solidary with Black lives. I replied to one such statement from a former employer. Together, over email, my ex-boss and me bore a strange kind of witness: I to what was, perhaps, the first real "racial reckoning" of his life, and he to my freedom to tell the whole truth. After our back-and-forth, I began writing about my experience as a Black woman poet and arts administrator navigating the literary world. The result is an exploration of micro-miscommunications, egregious displays of dominance, virtue signaling, and resistance to both new and old ways of being.

talking out of turn is tentatively scheduled to be published in 2025.

Please visit Nicole’s X, Instagram, and Facebook for more information.