Sjohnna McCray

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sjohnna McCray earned a BS from Ohio University, an MFA from the University of Virginia, and an MA from the Teachers College at Columbia University. He is the author of Rapture (2016), winner of the 2015 Walt Whitman Award. His work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Shenandoah, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. Of McCray's poems, Tracy K. Smith writes, "These poems are … so full of what I like to think of as lyrical wisdom—the visceral revelations that only music, gesture and image, working together can impart."

McCray is the winner of an Emerson Poetry Prize and an AWP Intro Journal Award. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, and teaches at Savannah State University.

Prize anthology mentions

Best American Essays 2020*

* indicates notable/special mention

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