Shakeema Smalls is a poet and developmental editor from Georgetown, South Carolina. Her work has been widely published in outlets such as Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Emergent Literary, Tidal Basin Review, Root Work Journal, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fruit Journal, and Foglifter, among others. She is an alum of the Tin House Workshop, the Obsidian Foundation, Lambda Literary Workshop, and VONA. She was a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and served as the inaugural Markus D. Manley Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Lab in 2024. She was recently named a 2025 SouthArts South Carolina Literary Fellow. ​​Winner of the inaugural Polaris Poetry Series prize, her debut poetry collection, Sweetwater Mass, is forthcoming from Blair Publisher in January 2027.