Simone White

A spectacled African American woman with a hair bun and loop earrings sitting by a window
Photo by Dana Scruggs

Simone White was born Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Philadelphia. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University, JD from Harvard Law School, and MFA from the New School. White is the author of the full-length collections House Envy of All the World (2010), and or, on being the other woman (2022), as well as the chapbooks Dolly (2008) and Unrest (2013). Her work has been praised for its innovative complexity, allusive song, and “lyric deconstruction of desire, entitlement, blackness, the domestic, language and diction,” in the words of Anna Moschovakis. White has received fellowships from Cave Canem and was selected as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America. She lives in New York and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.