Hear 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Julian Randall read from his debut Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) of which the final prize judge Vievee Francis says, “Ultimately, these poems renounce. Randall’s work speaks to his refusal to abide by the expected boundaries and binaries set out for him.” Vievee Francis, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, honorable mention for Stepmotherland, and Shayla Lawson, honorable mention for Ti Ador(n)0, kick off the evening with introductory readings. Free and open to the public. Refreshments to follow. This event is co-sponsored by the NYU Creative Writing Program.
Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as New York Times Magazine, The Georgia Review and Sixth Finch, as well as the anthologies Portrait in Blues, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color and New Poetry from the Midwest. He is a MFA candidate for Poetry at Ole Miss.
Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for a second collection, and Forest Primeval (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a poet and playwright from Panama City, Panama. His poems have been nominated for two Pushcart Prize and were finalists for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. He won the 2017 C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize for Poetry International and was a finalist for the 2016 Split This Rock! National Poetry Prize, the 2017 National Poetry Series, the BOAAT Poetry Prize, the Rumi Prize in Poetry and Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. His is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, CantoMundo and Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers Conference, among others. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Holnes teaches at NYU and is an Assistant Professor of English at CUNY – Medgar Evers College.
Shayla Lawson is the author of I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (Saturnalia Books, 2018). She is a 2018 Yaddo Artist Colony Fellow, a 2017 MacDowell Fellow, and Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College.