Celebrate the launch of Marissa Davis‘ My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak, winner of the fifth annual Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, selected by Danez Smith and published by Jai-Alai Books. Davis reads alongside Cave Canem fellow Roi Cortez, winner of the inaugural Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for her manuscript, I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains. This event is part of the month-long virtual O, Miami Poetry Festival. Free and open to the public.
Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her original poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Duende, Verse of April, Rattle, The Iowa Review, and Sundog Lit; her translations are forthcoming in Ezra and Mid-American Review. She graduated with a BA from Vanderbilt University and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at New York University as a Rona Jaffe fellow. Marissa is a poetry editor on the Nashville Review’s team, as well as an assistant translations editor for Washington Square Review.
Rio Cortez is a Pushcart-nominated poet, who has received fellowships from Poet’s House, Cave Canem, and Canto Mundo Foundations. Cortez was selected by Ross Gay as the inaugural winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for her manuscript, I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains, available from Jai-Alai Books. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.