Education
- BA, Literature and Languages, Bennington College
- MFA, Creative Writing, The New School
- PhD, English, The University of Illinois at Chicago
Biography
Rone Shavers is author of the experimental Afrofuturist novel Silverfish (Clash Books), a finalist for the 2021 Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker (CLMP) Award in Fiction, a Big Other Book Award, and one of The Brooklyn Rail’s “Best Books of 2020.” He writes in multiple literary genres and his work has appeared in numerous journals, including Action-Spectacle, Another Chicago Magazine, Big Other, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, PANK, and The Vestal Review. His honors include a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers and Mentoring Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a Nancy B. Negley Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, and an Arthur T. Schwab Poet-in-Residence fellowship at MacDowell. Shavers has also received artist-in-residence fellowships to the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Loghaven Artist Residency, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA France, and several other locales. His most recent creative work is Ten Crônicas, a chapbook collection of prose poems, published by The Magnificent Field in 2021.
Shavers is fiction and hybrid genre editor at the award-winning journal, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and his critical essays and reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as American Book Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Critical Flame, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. Additionally, Shavers co-curated and wrote the catalog for the 2019 art exhibition titled, “In Place of Now: Established and Emerging Artists Explore Black Identity through an Afrofuturist Lens,” which featured the artwork of Willie Cole, Renee Cox, and Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, among others, and took place at the Opalka Galley of Sage College in Albany, NY.
Shavers is Associate Professor of English at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has previously taught creative writing courses at The College of Saint Rose, the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.