Arlene Keizer

Arlene Keizer is a scholar, literary critic, and poet who writes about the literature, lived experience, theory, and visual art of the African Diaspora. Her poetry collection Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black—a cycle of poems about the African American artist Beauford Delaney—won the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in the Wick Poetry Series in 2023. Among her other publications are the monograph Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery, contributions to scholarly volumes, and articles and poems in a range of venues including American Literature, PMLA, Poem-a-Day, African American Review, Radical Teacher, and TriQuarterly. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the Pembroke Center at Brown, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The daughter of emigrants from Trinidad, she has made Brooklyn, NY her home. She is a professor at Pratt Institute.