Tiphanie YaniqueProfessor of English and Creative Writing

Tiphanie Yanique is the author most recently of the novel, Monster in the Middle, which was on numerous best of the year lists.  Monster in the Middle was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, the Townsend Prize and was selected as a Library of Congress Great Read for 2023.  Prof. Yanique is also the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection, the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award.  Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She is the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation's 5Under35 and the Bocas Prize in Fiction.  Her writing has won the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, an Academy of American Poet's Prize and two Fulbright Scholarships.

Prof. Yanique is also an outspoken activist on behalf of the Caribbean, having appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, and published an op-ed in The New York Times on the US response to hurricanes in the Caribbean. Prof. Yanique is a member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective, a group of activists, academics and artists who do decolonial work in and about archives.  Prof. Yanique is a passionate teacher who is the winner of an Excellence in Teaching Award.  

Prof. Yanique’s research expertise include

• Character Development in Fiction
• Structure in Prose
• Poetry in the Archive
• Decolonial Creative Practice
• Eco-poetics & Writing the Natural Environment
• Caribbean Literatures
• Black Atlantic Literatures
• Post-Colonial and Decolonial Literatures