Shayla Lawz

Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden (DiSC), and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, where she was the inaugural 2022 Writer In-Residence at Virginia Tech. She holds a BA in English from Rutgers University and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Her writing and hybrid/sound work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Poetry Foundation, Catapult, and Obsidian, among others and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has performed at Brown University, Rutgers University, The University of Arizona Poetry Center and featured in virtual programming such as The Poetry Project’s New Year’s Marathon and Playground Coffee Shop’s In the Midst of Unabashed Love. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. (University of Chicago Press) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Poetry Foundation, The Slowdown, and NPR’s On The Record. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

MFA, Brown University
BA, Rutgers University