About E. Hughes
E. Hughes is the author of two collections of poetry: Another Way to Say Dying (forthcoming Autumn House Press 2027), which won the 2026 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize and Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books, 2024), which was longlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award. Hughes received their MFA in Poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University.
Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, and Poem-A-Day by Poets.org—among others. Hughes is a graduate fellow of Cave Canem and a former Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Laureate. They have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest.
Currently, Hughes is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Emory University. Their dissertation, Without Ground: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Unbeing, considers the racial consequences of metaphysical inquiry after Immanuel Kant through a comparative analysis of continental philosophy and African American and African Diasporic literature.