Hear three brilliant Cave Canem fellows read work from their new and debut collections. Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017), of which Grace Cavalieri says, “this heroic writing is in the spirit of Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddamn!” Pushcart Prize winner Marcus Wicker’s second collection, Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), has been praised by Adrian Matejka as “masterful and hard-hitting…exactly the book we need.” The 2016-17 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Yolanda Wisher’s debut, Monk Eats an Afro (Small Press Distribution, 2014), was described by Sonia Sanchez as a collection of “exquisite poems.” Free and open to the public. This event is co-sponsored by the NYU Creative Writing Program.
A Pushcart Prize winner, Lambda Award finalist and a 2015 New American Poet who has received fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Center for Faith and Work, Hedgebrook and Cave Canem, Kamilah Aisha Moon‘s work has been featured widely, including in Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, and elsewhere. Featured nationally at conferences, festivals and universities including the Library of Congress and Princeton University, she holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught at several institutions, including Rutgers University-Newark and Columbia University. A native of Nashville, TN, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.
Marcus Wicker is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, The Missouri Review‘s Miller Audio Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the Fine Arts Work Center. His first collection, Maybe the Saddest Thing, a National Poetry Series winner, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, and Boston Review. His second book, Silencer, was published in 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Marcus teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis and is the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review.
Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (Philadelphia Mural Arts, 2013) with Sonia Sanchez. Her work has been featured in a variety of media including Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, GOOD Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Contemporary Black Canvas, Radio Times, PoetryNOW, Ploughshares, and CBC Radio. A Pew Fellow & Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. She served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts, and founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals. She has led workshops and curated events in partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Free Library of Philadelphia, and U.S. Department of Arts & Culture. Wisher is currently the 2017-2018 CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.