Cortney Lamar Charleston will read from his poetry. Click here if you would like to receive the Zoom link via email for this event. Free and open to the public.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017) and Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.
“Cortney Lamar Charleston fills Telepathologies with his big-hearted, yet biting and clear-eyed analysis. These powerfully worded poems do not let us look away, neither from the ills and woes infecting contemporary black life nor from the role of media (news, social) in circulating them among us. We move from concrete poems to ghazals to familiar and unfamiliar forms of free verse. Charleston keeps us on our toes as we follow him into spaces of blackness—those that he inhabits and those that inhabit him. In these poems, even in the face of fatal violence, the black body lives and breathes, mourns and survives. I welcome this poet’s debut.”
—Evie Shockley, author of the new black (and also our 2016 Featured Author)
“Once again, Cortney Lamar Charleston has proven why he is one of the most profound, singular voices of a generation. He says, “I’m beside myself almost always: A-side, B-side,” and a door into the magic of lyric opens wide. In Doppelgangbanger, Charleston offers us a study in precision, in history—he takes us on a walk towards an understanding of our cultural injuries while leading us out of the darkness, still. Doppelgangbanger is a groundbreaking collection that I can’t wait to return to.”—Camonghne Felix, author of Build Yourself a Boat
Learn more about Cortney Lamar Charleston (and read a few of his poems) here.