Enjoy a night of poetry with Cave Canem friends and fellows! Poets Rico Frederick, Erica Mapp, and Camille Rankine read in celebration of the work and artistry of Caribbean communities. This program is co-presented as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturdays event series.
Rico Frederick is a graphic designer and the author of the book Broken Calypsonian (Penmanship Books, 2014). He holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute, is a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, Cave Canem Fellow and the first poet to represent all four original New York City poetry venues at the National Poetry Slam. Rico is a Trinidadian transplant, lives in New York, loves gummy bears, and scribbles poems on the back of maps in the hope they will take him someplace new.
Artist and poet Erica Mapp, originally from Trinidad, lives in New York City. She received a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and a MA in Art Education from New York University’s School of Education. She studied poetry for two years at the graduate level at Queens College, CUNY. She is seeking publication for a poetry manuscript based on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, and another manuscript about the urgent need to preserve the Caribbean rain forest. She is a Cave Canem fellow, and received a Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA in 2017. Her work has been published both nationally and abroad in anthologies and periodicals, including The Caribbean Writer (Volumes 29, 30, and 31), The Riverside Poets Anthology, and Brevitas (2015, 2016 and 2017 Anthologies).
Camille Rankine is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her first book of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, was published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press, and her chapbook, Slow Dance with Trip Wire (Poetry Society of America, 2011), was selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. She is the recipient of a 2010 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, Octopus Magazine, A Public Space, Tin House, and elsewhere. She serves on the Executive Committee of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, as president of the board of The Poetry Project, teaches at The New School, and lives in New York City.