Cave Canem is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets. This Poets on Craft event features Kyle Dargan, Monica Ferrell, and Kyla Marshell.
Kyle Dargan is the author of three collections of poetry: The Listening (2004), which won the Cave Canem Prize, Bouquet of Hungers(2007), awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry, and Logorrhea Dementia (2010). His poems and non-fiction have appeared in newspapers such as the Newark Star-Ledger, and journals such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares, among others. Former managing editor of Callaloo, Dargan is also the founding editor of the magazine Post no Ills. He earned his BA from the University of Virginia and MFA from Indiana University, where he was a Yusef Komunyakaa fellow and poetry editor of the Indiana Review. He is the Director of Creative Writing at American University and lives in Washington DC.
Monica Ferrell’s first collection of poems, Beats for the Chase, was published by Sarabande Books in 2008. Her first novel, The Answer is Always Yes, appeared from the Dial Press in May 2008. A former “Discovery”/The Nation prizewinner and Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Tin House, and other magazines and anthologies. She lives in Brooklyn.
Kyla Marshell’s poems and essays have appeared online and in print in Blackbird, Calyx, Eleven Eleven, Mythium, the November 3rd Club, PMS poem-memoir-story, SPOOK Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poetry earned her an Academy of American Poets College Prize, Cave Canem and Jacob K. Javits fellowships, a Vermont Studio Center residency, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. More recently, Kyla has published essays, articles, interviews, and reviews in Gawker, the Guardian, REVIVE Music, Sarah Lawrence Magazine, Wondaland.com, and Zora Magazine. Her writing has garnered recognition from Ebony.com, which in 2013, named her one of "7 Young Black Writers You Should Know." The lifestyle site Ravishly.com called Kyla one of "3 Emerging Writers Carrying on the Torch of Maya Angelou." She is a graduate of Spelman College with a BA in English.
Sponsored by The Creative Writing Program and Cave Canem Foundation.