Shayla Lawz

A black woman with long braided hair wearing a yellow top and a black cardigan. There is a plant with big leaf in the cream yellow background.
Photo by Elena Mudd.

Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City. She holds a BA in English from Rutgers University and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Her debut poetry collection “speculation, n.” (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize.

Lawz 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, and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. Her writing/hybrid work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Catapult, and The Poetry Project, among other publications. She is the inaugural Hurston/Wright Foundation Writer-In-Residence at Virginia Tech for the summer of 2022.

Lawz lives in Brooklyn, and teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.