Introducing Jelly Bucket's guest editor for the Black Lives Matter special section, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon!

LYRAE VAN CLIEF-STEFANON is the author of Open Interval, a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize and, and Black Swan, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as co-author of chapbooks Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, with Elizabeth Alexander, and Leading with a Naked Body with Leela Chantrelle. She is currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third poetry collection, and Purchase, a collection of essays. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. She was one of ten celebrated poets commissioned to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in conjunction with the 2015 exhibit One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works for MoMA. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca, NY, arts collective. In 2018, her work was featured in Courage Everywhere, celebrating women’s suffrage and the fight for political equality, at National Theatre London.