Pamela Sneed
Photo courtesy of the poet
Pamela Sneed is a poet, performer, visual artist, and art critic. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery (1998), Kong and Other Works (2009), and Funeral Diva (2020), which won the Lesbian Poetry Award from Lambda Literary in 2021. She is also the author of the chapbooks Lincoln (2014), Gift (2015), and Sweet Dreams (2018). Her poetry has appeared in 100 Best African American Poems (edited by Nikki Giovanni, 2010), Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays (edited by William Demastes, 2013), and Zoe Leonard’s Transcript of a Rally (2016). Sneed’s writing has appeared widely in magazines such as Art Forum, Hyperallergic, and the New York Times Magazine.
Sneed earned her BA from Eugene Lang College and MFA from Long Island University. Sneed has taught solo performance and writing for solo performance at Sarah Lawrence College and was the 2017 visiting critic at Yale and at Columbia University. She teaches online for the low-residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a visiting artist in the summer MFA program. She is an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts.