2022 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize Reading

Herman Beavers has selected Meredith Nnoka as the winner of the 2022 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Meredith Nnoka and Herman Beavers will read in a virtual event celebrating Nnoka’s win.

Since 2015, Cave Canem has collaborated with O, Miami to spotlight exceptional chapbook-length manuscripts by Black poets. The prize winner receives a $1000 award, publication of their manuscript by O, Miami Books, 10 copies of the chapbook, a residency in The Writer’s Room at The Betsy Hotel in Miami, and a featured reading.

RSVP here.

Meredith Nnoka is a Chicago-based writer, educator, and prison abolitionist. She has a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, both in Africana studies. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at a prison outside of Chicago and serves as program lead for Illinois’s annual Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards. Meredith’s first chapbook, A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music, is available from C&R Press. 

Herman Beavers is the author of Obsidian Blues, Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison, and The Vernell Poems. He is a Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 

This program is supported, in part, by Amazon Literary Partnership Poetry Fund in partnership with the Academy of American Poets; Consolidated Edison Company of New York; National Endowment for the Arts; and New York State Council on the Arts. Co-presented by O, Miami and the Betsy Hotel.