Valentines: Two Pieces by Shayla Lawz
“I become your language to reach your universe” (2023, collage)
About Shayla Lawz
Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of text, sound, and performance. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, The Hurston/Wright Foundation, and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. Her writing/hybrid work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Poetry Foundation, Catapult, and Obsidian, among other publications. She has been a visiting writer/performer at Rutgers University, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Brown University where she received her MFA. Her debut poetry collection “speculation, n.” (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Poetry Foundation, The Slowdown, and NPR’s On The Record. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.
