Shayla Lawz

Shayla was a featured author at the “Read Aloud Series” for SpeakTogether through the Children’s Defense Fund, Freedom Schools Summer Read Aloud Initiative on August 1, 2022.

Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City. She holds a BA in English from Rutgers University and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. Her writing/hybrid work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Catapult, and The Poetry Project, among other publications. Lawz is the inaugural Hurston/Wright Foundation Writer-In-Residence at Virginia Tech for the summer of 2022. Her debut poetry collection “speculation, n.” was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

Purchase this writer’s book via our virtual storefront on Bookshop.org, the bookselling platform that supports independent bookstores. A portion of proceeds from all book purchases will go toward helping support SpeakEasy’s nonprofit mission and our literary programs on stage, in schools, and on the road with The SpeakEasy Bookmobile.