Enjoy a display of exceptional poetry featuring new collections by Cave Canem fellows Mitchell L.H. Douglas, Alison C. Rollins and Cave Canem faculty Amber Flora Thomas. Author of three poetry collections, Mitchell L.H. Douglas' most recent, dying in the scarecrow's arms (Persea Books, 2018), holds "masterful poems" that "serve as questions and facts, protests and affirmations," as said by Adrian Matejka. A recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, Alison C. Rollins is the author of Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Amber Flora Thomas is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018), described by Camille T. Dungy as exhibiting a voice that is "fresh, fierce and wildly alive." Free and open to the public. Refreshments served. Co-sponsored with The New School Creative Writing Program.
Mitchell L.H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms (Persea Books, 2018), \blak\ \al-fə bet\ (Persea Books, 2013), winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award, and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem (Red Hen Press, 2009), a NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. His poetry has appeared in Callaloo, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015), Crab Orchard Review and Ninth Letter, among others. He is a co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem graduate, and Associate Professor of English at IUPUI.
Alison C. Rollins holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Born and raised in St. Louis city, she currently works as a Librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has most recently been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is a recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. Her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in Spring 2019. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Amber Flora Thomas is the author of three collections of poetry: Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018), The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012), and Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), which won the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A recipient of the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize, Richard Peterson Prize, and Ann Stanford Prize, her work has appeared in The New England Review, Tin House, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saranac Review, and Third Coast, as well as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and faculty member. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at East Carolina University in North Carolina.