About the Book

Cherene Sherrard’s poetry collection Vixen takes to task the historical narratives and artistic mediums that have shaped racial and gender identity. She asks her readers to closely examine the hand that guides the pen, the photographer behind the lens, and the star on stage. In powerful, finely crafted lines, Sherrard’s poems interrupt and redirect the conversation. Sherrard’s voice-driven poems are accessible to any reader interested in work that examines racial and black female representation within a historical, cultural, and artistic framework.

Praise for Vixen

Cherene Sherrard’s Vixen is one of the most stunning debut collections of recent years. Historically resonant and urgently contemporary, Cherene Sherrard’s work interrogates the raw, shifting, and corrosive narratives of racial identity that her poems unravel in multiple cultural iterations. Her speakers are dazzling and her lines crackle with her powerful and incisive intelligence. Vixen is a book I keep returning to again and again for both its wisdom and its passionate dramatic brilliance.
—David St. John

Vixen is a sharp knife elegantly sheathed in velvet, leather, and lace. What I mean is: the language is precise and pointed; the poetry’s graceful forms contain superb surprises; and the lives that take shape in Cherene Sherrard’s skilled and generous hands are richly textured, gorgeously various. Every word a sensation, every line a hard-earned luxury: this book leads us away from safety into worlds that black women learn to navigate through vexatious, merciless experience. Follow Sherrard into vixen country and get versed in its ‘iridescent mayhem.’
—Evie Shockley

How does a woman reimagine the world and cast herself anew in it? Vixen prompts such reconsideration—beginning with its title. How one feels and how one is pressured to feel frequently compete with one another. Sherrard gives voice to a much needed resistance. Her poems quietly amass their humor, affections and preoccupation with film, music, history—and the loveliest textures and colors. What a multifarious gathering of voices in this book. They don’t compete so much as question. We are all the better for hearing them.
—Yona Harvey

Originally from Los Angeles, Cherene Sherrard is a poet, scholar, and essayist. She is the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her creative writing and research explores the nuanced and multifaceted aspects of black life in the diaspora.  She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual […]

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