Cave Canem Faculty Read

Join us for an evening with Cornelius Eady, Cave Canem co-founder, and Evie Shockley, 2018 Pultizer Prize finalist, who will read from their work and engage in a conversation. A book signing and refreshments follow. Eady is the author of eight poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets and most recently, Hardheaded Weather, nominated for an NAACP Image Award. With his band Rough Magic, he has released the albums Book of Hooks (2013) and Singing While Black (2015). Shockley is the author of several books of poetry including the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), winner of the Black Caucus of ALA’s Literary Award for Poetry, a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and most recently, semiautomatic (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2017). Her honors include the Holmes National Poetry Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. Free and open to the public.

Cornelius Eady was born in 1954 in Rochester, New York. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Hardheaded Weather (Penguin, 2008). His Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Press, 1986), won the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has collaborated with jazz composer Diedre Murray in the production of several works of musical theater, including You Don’t Miss Your Water; Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999; Fangs, and Brutal Imagination, which received Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award in 2002. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Traveling Scholarship; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy; The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award (1994); and the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House. He is Professor of English and the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Evie Shockley's several publications include her most recent semiautomatic (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2017), finalist for 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), winner of the Black Caucus of ALA’s Literary Award for Poetry, a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and a critical volume,Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). You can find Shockley's poetry and essays featured in several anthologies such as Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (2010), A Broken Thing: Contemporary Poets on the Line (2011), and Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (2013). Her poetry has appeared in MELUS, Harvard Review, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere. Shockley received the 2012 Theodore H. Holmes '51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize, awarded to "a single poet of special merit" by the faculty of Princeton University’s creative writing program. Shockley received her BA in English from Northwestern University, followed by a JD from University of Michigan Law School, before earning her MA and PhD from Duke University. She is assistant professor in the English department at Rutgers University.