Chet’la Sebree

A poet and essayist, Chet’la Sebree (she/her) is the author of Blue Opening (Tin House, 2025); Field Study (FSG Originals, 2021), which was the winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Mistress (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2019), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry.

Raised in the Mid-Atlantic, Sebree earned a BA in English from the University of Richmond and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Sebree has received fellowships from Baldwin For The Arts, the Hawthornden Foundation, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo, among others. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Lit Hub,The New Republic, Pleiades, Poetry International, The Yale Review, and other publications.

A former director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, she lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at The George Washington University.