Eve Louise Ewing was born in 1986 and grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Her mother worked as a radio reporter and producer, while her father was an artist, creating a household that blended journalism, sound, and image in ways that later manifest in Ewing's own work. She attended Northside College Preparatory High School and participated in Young Chicago Authors, the city's longest-running youth literary organization. She earned an undergraduate degree with honors in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago, concentrating on twentieth-century African-American literature, and then a Master of Arts in Teaching from Dominican University, which led her to teach middle school Language Arts in Chicago Public Schools. Ewing continued her education at Harvard, earning a Master of Education in Education Policy and Management in 2013, followed by a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2016, where she served as editor and co-chair of the Harvard Educational Review.
Ewing's first book, *Electric Arches*, was published by Haymarket Books on September 12, 2017. The collection combines poetry, prose, and visual art, with Ewing stating that every piece is grounded in real events from her life. Publishers Weekly named it one of the most anticipated books of fall 2017, The Paris Review selected it as a staff pick, and it received the 2018 Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association, the Chicago Review of Books 2017 poetry award, and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. The book also earned a place on NPR's Best Books of 2017 list and the Chicago Tribune's Top Ten Books of the Year.
“Her second collection, *1919*, published in 2019, revolves around the stoning and drowning of Eugene Williams in Lake Michigan and the subsequent Chicago race riot.”
Ewing incorporates excerpts from "The Negro in Chicago," a document commissioned by the city following the riots, using that historical text as a foundation for individual poems. The collection has been recognized by NPR, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Review of Books, O Magazine, and LitHub, among others. Together, the two collections highlight the themes of Ewing's poetry: the Black experience in Chicago, the violence of institutional neglect, the burden of official forgetting, and the nuanced reality of Black girlhood and community life on the South Side.
Ewing is also an active sociologist. Her academic book *Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side*, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018, is based on her Harvard dissertation on school closures in Chicago's Bronzeville district. In it, she develops the concept of "institutional mourning" to describe the harm communities experience when their schools close. As of 2023, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in the University of Chicago's Division of the Social Sciences. Her work extends further: she wrote Marvel's *Ironheart* series focused on Riri Williams, became the first Black female author of Marvel's *Black Panther* series in 2023, co-created the Emerging Poets Incubator and the Chicago Poetry Block Party, teaches with the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project at Stateville Maximum Security Prison, and co-founded the Echo Hotel poetry collective with Hanif Abdurraqib. She has also been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Pamet River Prize.