Mahogany L. Browne

Mahogany L. Browne curated the Friday night slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for thirteen years and took an MFA in writing and activism at Pratt, where she directed the Black Lives Matter program and started a reading room for women writers of colour. Brooklyn-based, she was named the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center, has served as artistic director at Urban Word NYC, publishes Penmanship Books, and founded the Woke Baby Book Fair. Her collection Chrome Valley, from W. W. Norton, took the Paterson Poetry Prize in 2024, and Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts later chose her for its Holmes National Poetry Prize. Chlorine Sky, which Crown put out in January 2021, was her first novel in verse for younger readers: Sky has grown up in the shadow of her best friend Lay Li, and as high school pulls the two apart she finds her footing on a basketball court, the poems taking their idiom from the way she actually talks.