Shanta Gander

Shanta Lee is a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, and a multidisciplinary artist. She is a public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work featured in ITERANT Literary Magazine, CARVE Magazine, Palette Poetry, Blavity, DAME Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Literary Mama among others. She is the author of the poetry collection, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Her new illustrated full poetry collection, Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan 2023), is a work that Shanta Lee describes as a 2000+ year-old phone line opened to Ovid as well as an interrogation of the Greek mythos while creating her own new language in this work. Black Metamorphoses has been named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Idaho poetry prize. Shanta Lee's contributing work on several investigative journalism pieces have received a number of New England Newspaper & Press Association (NENPA) awards and the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts.

Shanta Lee gives lectures on the life of Lucy Terry Prince (c. 1730-1821) — considered the first known African-American poet in English literature — as a member of the Vermont and New Hampshire Humanities Council Speakers Bureaus in addition to serving as the 2020 gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council’s board of directors. Leading and collaborating has also been a huge part of Shanta Lee's professional and creative practice across a range of sectors that have spanned across the New England region. Projects have included co-curating the I AM… exhibition with the Vermont Arts Council along with her work on the statewide CreateVT, a strategic plan geared towards the creative sectors; An advisor for Jay Craven’s film, Lost Nation, which will illustrate how the Prince family and Ethan Allen took different paths toward the American dream; One of the project leaders of the Peoples, Places and the History of words, a multi-year grant awarded by the National Endowment for Humanities.

Shanta Lee is one of the writers for Ms. Magazine Blog, a regular contributor to Art New England and is a producer and reporter for Vermont Public. She has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has an MBA from the University of Hartford and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. Shanta Lee's current multimedia exhibition Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, is on view at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art. When she is not writing or exploring her next project, she loves exploring abandoned spaces, loves a good story, and loves anything that will make her laugh. Across all of her threads of passions and interest is an enduring hunger to seek what is beneath the surface.