Bianca Lynne Spriggs is an American poet and multidisciplinary artist born in Milwaukee, WI in 1981. She currently resides in Athens, OH where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. An Affrilachian Poet, she is the author of Kaffir Lily, How Swallowtails Become Dragons, The Galaxy is a Dance Floor, and Call Her By Her Name. She is the editor of The Swallowtale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women, and co-editor of the anthologies, Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women, Undead: A Poetry Anthology of Ghouls, Ghosts, and More, and Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets. Spriggs's work is considered primarily speculative in nature drawing upon mythology, folklore, surrealism, and science fiction for inspiration. She often focuses on the connections between art and community and the identity of Black women in the American South. From 2006 to 2012, she was the creator and artistic director of the annual Wild Women of Poetry Slam at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. In 2013, her poem "The ________ of the Universe: A Love Story" was tattooed onto 248 residents of Lexington as part of the Lexington Tattoo Project. Also in 2013, at Transylvania University's Morlan Gallery, she collaborated with videographer Angel Clark to curate the multimedia exhibit "The Thirteen," which memorialized 13 black women who were lynched or killed in Kentucky. She was featured on the track "Hypnopomp " in CunninLynguists' 2011 album Oneirology. Her passion for poetry sprouted from the visual arts, once she found solace in writing poems and stories. Her writing evolved into a career once she applied to be a writer for the Kentucky Foundation for Women and decided to pursue this practice as a full-time job. Her inspiration comes from her love for storytelling: "Sometimes writing is telling my own story through, and sometimes, it’s telling their stories through my own."
Spriggs is a 2013 recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recipient of five Artist Enrichment Grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, including an Arts Meets Activism grant. She was also named one of the Top 30 Black Performance Poets in the U.S. by TheRoot.com. She was the recipient of the 2016 Sallie Bingham Award for feminist expression in the arts. She was also a Cave Canem Fellow in 2006, 2007, and 2010.
Works
Kaffir Lily How Swallowtails Became Dragons Call Her By Her Name The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor co-editor of Circe’s Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women co-editor of Undead: Ghouls, Ghosts, and More co-editor of Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets
