Bernard Ferguson (they/them) is a Bahamian poet, essayist and is currently working on a book of nonfiction, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2024), about Hurricane Dorian, the effects of climate change on Small-Island Developing States, and how centuries of far-flung injustices—like colonization, slavery, and numerous inequalities at local and global scales—have come to cause the climate crisis.
Bernard is the winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, a winner of the 2019 92Y Discovery Contest, winner of The Cincinnati Review’s 2019 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, winner of The 2019 Breakwater Peseroff Poetry Prize, winner of the 2019 Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Prize, and an Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholar. They have served as Assistant Editor at Washington Square Review and has received fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, NYU’s Global Research Initiative, and New York City’s Writers in the Public Schools. They and their writing have been featured, published or forthcoming in The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, VICE News, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review and Winter Tangerine, as well as the Best New Poets 2017 anthology, among others. They teach creative writing at New York University and The New School. They hope you tell them all about your wonder.
Publications
Selected Essays & Reviews
“Damage and Loss,” The New York Times Magazine, 2021
“Searching for Gwendolyn Brooks,” The Paris Review Online, 2021
“Hurricane Dorian Was a Climate Injustice,” The New Yorker, 2019
Micro-Review of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, The Common, 2019
“Look At How The Bullets Have Missed,” The Rumpus, May 2018
Selected Poems
“the wrong horses,” Bat City Review
“awaiting a carriage, any,” Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day
“at last rationing the blue,” Daly News
“niggas in the sun,” No Tokens
“Mr. Jailer,” Winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award
“it might be a hurricane year,” Narrative
“noseeums,” The Southampton Review
“hearsay,” Breakwater Review
“i just don’t think we should have to subject ourselves to the violence that beckons outside,” Pinwheel
Press, Interviews and Lectures
“The Gulf Stream and the Atlantic World,” a conversation between Ada Ferrer, Bernard Ferguson, Hugh Hayden and Stephanie Herdrich, The Metropolitan Museum
“In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors,” Water~Stone Review
Q&A, The Hurston/Wright Foundation
On “you’re welcome,” winner of the 2019 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, The Cincinnati Review
Check out the full list of Bernard’s published work and features
Reach out, Drop a line.
