b ferguson (they/them) is a Bahamian poet, essayist, conflict mediator, and community educator.

They’ve taught creative writing in institutions like the University of Minnesota, New York University, The New School,and inside NYC Public Schools, and have lectured about the transformative capacity of creative writing as part of historical radical political movements. In 2023, due to institutional structures that rely on hoarding, domination, dispossession, and elitism, b swore away from relying on or participating in large institutions and committed, instead, to a political art and teaching practice that is grounded in teaching, collaborating and organizing with those who are marginalized by the interlocked inhuman structures that make up US and “western” societies. Now, whenever they have stable housing, they teach liberatory art making and workshops in community orgs and in their living room.

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If it’s important to you, their more institutional history can be found in their cv, and some of it narrativized in the below alternative bio:

b has had lots of canonical and institutional accomplishments across the past decade of practicing poetry and nonfiction: They recieved an MFA in Poetry from New York University, and by the luck and the approval of friends and gatekeepers inside other (structurally exploitative) institutions, their work has won the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, the 92Y Discovery Contest, The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, the Breakwater Peseroff Poetry Prize, and the Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Prize. They’ve been published or featured in places like The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Times, The New Yorker, VICE News,The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day, and Winter Tangerine, and anthologized in US Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and Best New Poets 2017. They have received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), New York Foundation for the Arts, NYU’s Creative Writing Graduate Program, NYU’s Global Research Initiative, and New York City’s Writers in the Public Schools.