Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, poet essayist, and Professor of English & Creative Writing at Emory University. Her scholarly and creative expertise are in decolonial literary craft, pedagogy, Caribbean studies and eco-literatures.   

Yanique is the author of the 2021 novel, Monster in the Middle, which was on numerous best of the year lists and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, the Townsend Prize and was selected as a Library of Congress Great Read for 2023. Tiphanie’s other award-winning works include the poetry collection Wife; the novel Land of Love and Drowning; and 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.  

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. Born in St. Thomas into the Smith and Galiber families, Tiphanie Yanique is a native and ancestral Virgin Islander with roots in the USVI and the BVI. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective.