Shanta Lee
Shanta Lee is a writer across genres, a visual artist and a public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that is widely featured. Winner of the National Arts Strategies - New England Creative Community Fellowship and the Abel Meeropol Social Justice award, Shanta Lee also produced and created Vermont Public’s “Seeing...the Unseen and In-Between within Vermont’s Landscape.” Shanta Lee is the author of several collections and a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine and Art New England. Her collections include GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, Black Metamorphoses, and her latest forthcoming book, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The... (Harbor Editions, 2024). As a visual artist, Shanta Lee’s multimedia exhibitions have included, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine – a work that includes her short film, interviews, and photography, and items from the museum's permanent collection – has been on view at the Bennington Museum, the Fleming Museum of Art, and the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Shanta Lee has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com.
Author photo courtesy of Damon Honeycutt
Books
GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA
Publication Date:
June 2021
“This time, I teach myself how to say gimme / This time, I am fluent in / No / Mines / You can’t have”
from "Lessons in Development from a Butterfly"
What does it mean to move away from the shadow of one’s mother, parents, or family in order to come into being within this world? As collective memory within the Black diaspora has been ruptured, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA time travels by creating and recapturing memory from a fractured past to survive in the present and envision a future. In her first full-length collection GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, Shanta Lee navigates between formal and vernacular styles to introduce the reader to a myriad of subjects such as scientific facts that link butterflies to female sexuality and vulnerability; whispers of classical Greek myth; H.P. Lovecraft’s fantastical creature, Cthulhu; and the traces of African mythmaking and telling. Beneath the intensity, longing, seeking, wondering, and the ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ voice that sometimes tussles with sadness, there is a movement of sass and a will that refuses to say that it has been broken. Lee leaves a door ajar in this ongoing conversation of the Black female body that walks the spaces of the individual within a collective; the tensions between inherited and hidden narratives; and the present within a history and future that is still being imagined.
Close Is... and Hopscotch Between the Living and the Dead
Fall 2024
Publication Date:
In this double feature of a hybrid work of poetry and creative non-fiction prose, readers experience a relentless contemplation through a woven tapestry of human connections, estrangements, and the complex, often painful dynamics that bind us. What is the exchange rate for human closeness? Within one part of the collection, Close Is… holds a direct and unflinching mirror to humanity, forcing the question: Is human connection worth the emotional, psychical, and spiritual exchange rate? Who and what should be considered our own if our own, the human species, causes inevitable beauty and pain within our attempts to create, breach, sever, and explore the range of human relationships. And does the answer lie in expanding our horizon beyond what we consider as...human. Hopscotch Between the Living and the Dead descends into the depths of a family narrative through vivid imagery and scenes that encapsulate us within linguistic hopscotch as it unzips. A childhood game that instructs players to move forwards and backward within a chalk-drawn board on concrete, Hopscotch takes readers through a labyrinthian path of family secrets, the living and the dead, and a reckoning with surfacing the unseen of memory through vivid fragments across time.
This double volume adventures through the liminal spaces of being human while containing an abyss of yearning to close the gap between ourselves and others. At any cost.
