bio.

Niki Herd is the author of two poetry collections, The Stuff of Hollywood (2024) and The Language of Shedding Skin (2011), and the chapbook  ____ , don’t you weep (2022). With Meg Day, she co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (2019), named one of the year’s “hidden gems” by Ms. Magazine. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism, appear in or are forthcoming from The Adroit, Poetry Daily, Pleiades, Action, Spectacle, New England Review, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Copper Nickel, the Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Obsidian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. Her poems have been anthologized in This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta!, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.

Herd’s work has been supported by organizations such as MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Newberry Library, the DC Commission on the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem. She has presented lectures and taught workshops at Carlow University, the Community College of Baltimore County, Writers-in-the-Schools, and Rutgers University. Herd has taught at the University of Houston and Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Lancaster, PA where she’s an assistant professor at Franklin & Marshall College.