Stacey Waite is a poet, activist, educator, and scholar who conducts research in the field of composition and the teaching of writing as well. Originally, from Long Island, New York, Stacey received a Master of Fine Arts in writing in 2002 and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011. Waite is now Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Waite is both poet and performer, exploring the gendered spaces in which we live (or do not live) while re-inventing the poetry reading itself. Waite’s poems are both lyrical and narrative, both subtle song and charged spoken word as they re-imagine and re-define the ways we think about gender as it moves us through the territory of an androgynous life. Waite has been a headliner at poetry slams, a featured reader at conferences nationwide and has opened for nationally recognized musicians and performers, such as Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey and the Rock at the Byham Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA and for the comic Jenny McNulty in Ventura, California. Waite’s work is celebrated for its versatility and accessibility, making waves in diversity education and queer outreach activism as well as academic settings.

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Poet and Editor of Prairie Schooner, Kwame Dawes, says of Waite’s poetry: "Waite is a pathfinder, charting with disarming honesty, humor, pathos, and willful perplexity the uncertain terrain of gender in ways that shatter assumptions, unsettle easy presumptions, and yet, through the sheer grace of craft...open us to the beauty of our strange human enterprise.”

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About Love Poem to Androgyny, writer Jan Beatty remarks:“ Love Poem to Androgyny is a collection where exhilaration meets struggle meets rage meets deliverance into the complicated body . . . This women/man thing has run its course and it’s run right into the rolling, pressing, relentless lines of Waite’s poetry.”

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You can see two of Stacey Waite’s riveting performances on the renowned Button Poetry channel here and here​​

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