Bianca Spriggs

Bianca Spriggs is a black American poet and multidisciplinary artist born in Milwaukee, WI, in 1981. She currently resides in Lexington, Kentucky. An Affrilachian Poet, she is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications, 2010), How Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing, 2011), and the forthcoming titles, The Galaxy is a Dance Floor (Argos Books, 2016), and Call Her By Her Name (Northwestern University Press, 2016). She is the editor of The Swallowtale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women (2012), and the co-editor of the anthologies, Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women (Accent's Publishing, 2015), and Undead: A Poetry Anthology of Ghouls, Ghosts, and More (Apex Publications, 2016). She is the Managing Editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and the Poetry Editor for Apex Magazine.

Spriggs graduated from Transylvania University in 2003 with a degree in history and a minor in studio art. She received her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2005 and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Kentucky.

Spriggs is a 2013 recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recipient of five Artist Enrichment Grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She was also named one of the Top 30 Black Performance Poets in the U.S. by TheRoot.com.