Bio
SHORT BIO
Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, photographer, and educator born and raised in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants, and she currently resides in Mississippi. Her debut full-length collection of poetry and photography, Watersheds, will be published by CavanKerry Press in March 2025, and it was also a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize. Her writing and photography have been published widely, and she has received several awards and honors including a 2024 Mississippi STAR Teacher Award, 2024 Artist Mini-Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a 2024 Vance Fellowship from the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, the 2023 Poet of the Year Honoree of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a 2020 semifinalist position in the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, a 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award nomination, and the 2019 honorable mention poetry prize from the Hurston/Wright College Writers Award. Nadia's photography has been exhibited in several shows in the U.S. and Cuba. A fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole, she holds a PhD and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi.
(short bio is the most up to date bio)
LONG BIO
Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, photographer, writing coach, and educator who was born in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants. Her debut full-length collection of poems and photographs, titled Watersheds, will be published by CavanKerry Press in Spring 2025. The collection was also a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Poetry Prize. She currently resides in Mississippi where she teaches creative writing, American Literature, British Literature, First-Year Writing courses, and Black Literature. Nadia holds a BA in Political Science from Union College where she also studied Africana Studies and French. She holds a PhD in English - Creative Writing Concentration from the University of Mississippi, where she also earned her MFA in Creative Writing.
Nadia's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in various literary journals, including Kweli Journal, Indiana Review, MQR: Mixtape, Mud Season Review, Shenandoah, and Texas Review. Her essays have been published in Poets & Writers, Madame Noire, On She Goes, and BLACK STEW. She was the featured visual artist in TORCH Literary Journal’s 2016 Spring/Summer issue and has additional photographic works published in fields magazine, Forgotten Lands, MQR: Mixtape, and Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. Her photography in Mfon features over 100 women photographers of African descent from around the world. Nadia has received award nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net Anthology, and the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in photography. She has also received poetry fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole, and has been mentored by Carrie Mae Weems in an independent scholars fellowship program. In 2019, she received an honorable mention prize in poetry from the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Award for College Writers, and in 2020, she was named a semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest.
Nadia has an extensive background in education and has served as a curator for the Trobar Ric Poetry Reading Series from 2018 to 2019, an independent reading series based in Oxford, MS. She is currently a member of the creative writing faculty at the McMullan Young Writers Workshop at Millsaps College where she teaches poetry and was also previously a creative writing instructor in the summer youth camps at the University of Mississippi’s Pre-College Program. Furthermore, Nadia is currently the Literary Arts Instructor and spearheads Literary Arts programming as the Literary Arts Department Head at the Mississippi School of the Arts where she teaches poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and playwriting. Her commitment to educating the next generation of writers is evident through her teaching and mentorship.
Currently, Nadia is working on Watersheds, her full-length hybrid manuscript of poems and photographs, while building additional photographic works, and writing a young adult novel-in-verse. In October 2022, Watersheds was named a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Poetry Prize. She is primarily a self-taught photographer who has been making photographs since 2014. Her What Endures series was exhibited in the month-long 2019 Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba, as part of the multidisciplinary group exhibition titled The Spirit That Resides. Her work was also on view in Detroit in the multidisciplinary group exhibition Beyond Space from Fall 2019 to Winter 2020, and at the Motel Art Show in Oxford, MS in Fall 2019. From March 2019 to March 2021, works from her What Endures series were on view in the J.D. Williams Library of the University of Mississippi, and in June 2021, photographs from that series were on view in the On Protest and Mourning virtual exhibition at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in Harlem. Recently, she had her first solo exhibition at the Gammill Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi where all works from What Endures as well as works from her new series-in-progress titled My mother says I can build a new home from clouds & I believe her were on view from January 2022 to February 2022. Her poetry and photography will be featured in The Global South's EcoArt issue, which is scheduled to be published in Spring 2023.
Nadia's work from her Family Photos series is currently on view at The Carr Center in Detroit, MI, as part of The Female and Nonbinary Gaze Exhibition from May 7, 2023 to June 2, 2023. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose work combines poetry and photography, exploring themes of identity, memory, and place. Her photographs capture the beauty of the natural world, while her poems reflect on personal and political experiences.
In addition to her artistic work, Nadia is an educator and organizer. She has taught creative writing workshops and has curated poetry events in Mississippi.