Shayla Hawkins lives in Michigan and is the author of Carambola and Exquisite by September, runner-up for the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. She's been a Medusa fan since elementary school, when her first grade teacher read a story about a woman with snakes for hair and whose glance could turn people into stone.

Books by Shayla Hawkins:

Other poems on the web by Shayla Hawkins:
"Treasure"
Four poems
"The Mango Virgin"

Shayla Hawkins on Twitter.

About Exquisite by September:

"There's an exotic sensualness threading the poems in Hawkins' outstanding collection…Hawkins skillfully balances moments of deep pleasure, love, and beauty with harsh societal realities in a truly exquisite collection you will not want to miss."
—Diane DeCillis

"Shayla Hawkins offers us many reasons to fall in love with poetry again: her lyrics are spare, unaffected, and deeply felt. They know how to sing to us, how to awaken the poetry in each of us."
—Marilyn Kallet

"Exquisite by September takes us to real and imagined places where all our senses are aroused and ordinary experiences are bathed in the lush light of imagery and metaphor. We're invited to feel more deeply a first kiss, the resonance of words, the presence of a ghost; to hear the sounds beneath a song, to draw new meanings from a painting and find new ways to savour ‘the rip tide and rapture of [our] flesh.'"
—Tanya Shirley

"Raised in Motown, molded by the music of its Electrifying Mojo, Hawkins unapologetically revels in what is elicited in so many of us by the shadows cast by parabola and curve—she extends to us, at the very least, a merciful sympathy for how it moves us to song. This collection reflects on how the softness of a grandmother is as much a story of her breasts as her kiss; reminds us that Jesse Johnson was worthy of peerage, if not a prince; recalls the tectonics of tongues ‘licked like a needle on a record.' Her candor is a declaration that she is privy to the ‘pretenses of our decorum.' Paddle ‘the shallow waters of respectability' if you want to, but Shayla Hawkins ain't the one."
—Cedric Tillman