Cave Canem Faculty Reading & Conversation

Join us for an evening with Cave Canem faculty Dawn Lundy Martin and Willie Perdomo, both of whom will read from their work before engaging a moderated conversation. Recipient of a PEN/Open Book Award, Willie Perdomo is the author of The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Poets, 2019) and The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Poets, 2014), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the International Latino Book Award. Martin is the author of four books of poetry, including A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), selected by Carl Phillips for the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011), finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize; and most recently, Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A book signing and refreshments follow.

Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist and conceptual-video artist. Recipient of a 2018 NEA grant for Creative Writing, she is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017), winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize; and three limited edition chapbooks including The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper’s and elsewhere. In 2016, Martin co-founded, with poet Terrance Hayes, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh, where she serves as the center’s director. With Vivien Labaton, Martin also co-edited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004), and co-founded the Third Wave Foundation, an organization which was for 15 years the only young activist feminist foundation in the U.S., and Black Took Collective, an experimental performance art/poetry group of three. Martin is Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Crazy Bunch (Penguin, 2019); The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2005), winner of the PEN/Open Book Award; and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, Bomb Magazine, and African Voices. He is currently a member of the VONA/Voices faculty, a Lucas Arts Literary Fellow and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.