Rone Shavers McGee Professor of Creative Writing

I am the author of the experimental Afrofuturist novel Silverfish (Clash Books), which was a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, a Big Other Book Award finalist, and one of The Brooklyn Rail’s “Best Books of 2020.” I write in multiple literary genres and my work has appeared in numerous journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Identity Theory, PANK, and The Operating System. 

My critical essays and essay-length reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as American Book Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Electronic Book Review, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. My most recent creative work is Ten Crônicas, a chapbook collection of prose poems published by The Magnificent Field, and in my spare time, I’m a fiction and hybrid genre editor at Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Some past honors that I’ve garnered include a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers and Mentoring Artist-in-Residence fellowship to the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a Nancy B. Negley writer-in-residence fellowship at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, and an Arthur T. Schwab poet-in-residence fellowship to MacDowell. I’ve also been awarded artist-in-residence fellowships to Ragdale, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and several other locales. 

I teach courses in fiction and contemporary literature at The University of Utah, but as the McGee Professor of Creative Writing here at Davidson, I’m excited to help students broaden their knowledge of just what fiction can do and precisely how it does it, as well as their understanding of why creative writing desperately matters—to both our social and individual well-being.