Evie Shockley is the author of one book of poetry, a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two poetry chapbooks, 31 words  *  prose poems (Belladonna* Books, 2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (Carolina Wren Press, 2001). Her poems also appear and are forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Indiana Review, The Southern Review, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hambone, No Tell Motel, Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review, HOW2, nocturnes (re)view, Achiote Seeds, Tuesday; An Art Project, Poetry Daily: Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the African Diaspora, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. She currently co-edits jubilat; in 2007, she guest-edited a special issue of MiPOesias (called "~QUEST~") that features contemporary African American poets.

She greatly enjoys giving readings of her poetry, which have taken her to colleges, universities, primary and secondary schools, libraries, festivals, and bookstores across the U.S. and in Scotland. Two of her poems, "a thousand words" and "the changing of the guards," were mounted in the Biko 30/30 exhibit, a commemoration of the life and work of anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko, which toured the major cities of South Africa in 2007, the 30th anniversary of his death.  She has served as faculty at such writers workshops as the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop and the North Carolina Writers' Network Summer Residency Program.

Shockley is also a literary scholar and critic. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry," has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She has published critical reviews and literary essays in such journals and anthologies as Indiana Review, Talisman, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Mixed Blood, and Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry; two additional essays are forthcoming in Poets on Teaching and A Broken Thing: Contemporary Poets on the Line. Additionally, articles from her earlier work on the gothic in African American and British Victorian literature appear in African American Review and in the essay collection Jamaica Kincaid's Caribbean Double-Crossings. She brings her theory of the "gothic homelessness" that circulates in African American literature to the broader cultural context of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in an essay that will appear in Katrina's Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America, an interdisciplinary collection of analyses of Katrina's significance for New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and the U.S. as a whole (forthcoming in 2010).

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Shockley has lived in a variety of states in the South, Midwest, and Northeast, but has yet to take up residence in any place west of the Mississippi River. She currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey and teaches African American literature and creative writing (poetry) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.