Author: Sheree Renée Thomas

Photo of Sheree Renée Thomas, a Black woman in red lipstick with her face framed by dark hair.

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (2020) is her first all prose collection. She is the author of the Marvel novel adaptation of the legendary comics, Black Panther: Panther’s Rage (2022). She is also the author of two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (2016), longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review, and Shotgun Lullabies (2011). She edited the World Fantasy-winning groundbreaking black speculative fiction anthologies, Dark Matter (2000 and 2004) and is the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction short stories. She was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist in the Special Award—Professional category for contributions to the genre and was Co-Host of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony at Discon III in Washington, DC with Malka Older. She is a Marvel writer and contributor to the groundbreaking anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, edited by Jesse J. Holland. Her latest fiction collection, Mojorhythm, was released in September 2025 by Third Man Books. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.

 

Photo by Danian Darrell Jerry.

Chickasaw Bluff Blues

Mississippi flows     carries secrets in silt   the bronze serpent’s scales

Cicada static      rasps against the high      noon sun

Trilobite locked      in the bluff’s      ancestral stone silence

Oil refinery flare      stains the bruised      twilight sky

Cicada static      rasps against high      noon sun

AI hum demands power    deepens discordant wire-strung   electric blues wail  

Oil refinery flare      stains bruised      twilight sky

Prayer flag tied      to an oaken branch      flutters from Lookout Mountain’s slope

AI hum demands power    deepens discordant wire-strung   electric blues wail  

Memphis Sand Aquifer’s slow         cool retreat      a blessing drained below    

Prayer flag tied      to an oaken branch      flutters from Lookout Mountain’s slope  

Screech owl cries      its omen from centuries old      bald cypress brake tonight  

Memphis Sand Aquifer’s      slow cool retreat      a blessing drained      below  

Mourning glory vines      climb abandoned      Defense Depot fence  

Screech owl cries      omen from centuries old      bald cypress brake tonight  

Cicada husks      cling brittle      porch screen mesh  

Mourning glory vines      climb abandoned      Defense Depot fence  

We gather breath,      community’s defiant hymn      against the humming wires

Cicada husks      cling brittle     porch screen mesh  

Chickasaw bluff erodes      inch by slow inch      toward the flood plain  

We gather breath,      community’s defiant hymn      against humming wires  

Trilobite locked      in bluff’s      ancestral stone silence  

Chickasaw bluff erodes      inch by slow inch      toward flood plain  

Mississippi flows      carries secrets in silt     justice’s bronze serpent’s scales