Bio

Shelagh Patterson is a poet, scholar, and educator, who was born on the unceded land of the Lenape people here in the borough we now call Brooklyn. They earned a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Poetry from Hunter College of The City University of New York (CUNY) and a PhD in English: Critical and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. They worked as a professional writer for City of New York Parks & Recreation and was awarded a Bronx Writers Fellowship. A Cave Canem fellow, they were project manager and literary expert for Cave Canem's "Magnitude & Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations." Patterson began working at CUNY's Medgar Evers College in 2024, where they teach College Composition I and II and serve as affiliated faculty to the Center for Black Literature and faculty support to Crystal Queer. Their recent work is published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and The Iowa Review.