Join Cave Canem for an evening of poetry in Bryant Park with Christian Campbell, Myronn Hardy, Dawn Lundy Martin and Michelle Whittaker. Free and open to the public. In case of rain, the event is held under a tent at the Reading Room.
Christian Campbell is the author of Running the Dusk (2010), which won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection and the Cave Canem Poetry Prize among other awards. Running the Dusk was translated into Spanish and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo (2015). Campbell studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and has received awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Works Center, Bread Loaf and elsewhere. His art criticism has been commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Guggenheim Bilbao, Nahmad Contemporary, Barbican Centre and Schirn Kunsthalle. He delivered the fifteenth annual Derek Walcott Lecture for Nobel Laureate Week in St. Lucia and also won the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries for his work on Jean-Michel Basquiat. Campbell was recently the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Myronn Hardy is the author of five books of poems: Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Prize for poetry, Kingdom, and most recently, Radioactive Starlings. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, FIED and elsewhere. He divides his time between New York City and Morocco.
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011), A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper's, and elsewhere. Martin is Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Co-director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
Michelle Whittaker has been published in the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, The Southampton Review, Narrative, and other publications. She was awarded a 2017 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and the author of the poetry collection, Surge (great weather for MEDIA). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University.