Bianca Spriggs

Bianca Lynne Spriggs (born 1981) is an American poet and multidisciplinary artist born in Milwaukee, WI. While widely considered a born-and-bred Kentuckian, she actually moved around a lot due to the nature of her parents' work. For several years of her childhood, she would bounce around from Florida, Indiana, and Milwaukee. She moved to Kentucky when she was eleven years old and lived there the longest. She currently resides in Athens, OH where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. As a second generation Affrilachian Poet, 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 (Epilogue)" in CunninLynguists' 2011 album Oneirology. In 2019, her poem "To the woman I saw today who wept in her car" was one of the most frequently viewed poems on a list of social justice-related poems maintained by Split This Rock. Her poems can also be found in anthologies and journals such as Union Station Magazine, Tidal Basin Review, New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings, America!, and the Appalachian Heritage Magazine. She was also influenced heavily by Jude McPherson and Eric Sutherland in her early career, as they were instrumental in encouraging her to grow her voice both reading in public and putting together her first chapbooks

Awards 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 a Cave Canem Fellow in 2006, 2007, and 2010.

Works Kaffir Lily (2010) How Swallowtails Became Dragons (2011) Call Her By Her Name (2016) The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor (2016)

Co-editor Circe’s Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women (2016) Undead: Ghouls, Ghosts, and More (2017) Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets (2018)