Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet known for her book, Voyage of the Sable Venus.

Biography

Lewis was born in Compton, California. She obtained an MFA from New York University and attended graduate school at Harvard Divinity School, where she received a master's degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature. Lewis was a professor at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the New York University Low-Residency MFA in Paris. She began writing poetry after a traumatic brain injury limited her writing to a single sentence each day. Lewis is in the Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. She has a fellowship in Poetry and Visual Studies.

Writing

Her first book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus won the National Book Award for poetry. The New York Times described it as "a taut book of responses to lunatic cultural ideas" and contained a "thrilling centerpiece," the title poem, 79 pages long.

According to Lewis, she obtained the idea for the book title from Thomas Stothard's engraving The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies. Lewis describes the book as "about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive."

Lewis's work has been published in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, and Transition.