New Works: Casey Rocheteau, Clint Smith and John Warner Smith

Hear three Cave Canem fellows read work from their new and debut collections. Casey Rocheteau, inaugural winner of Detroit’s permanent residency, Write A House, is the author of Knocked Up On Yes (Sargent Press, 2012), and The Dozen (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016); Franny Choi calls her “ruthlessly funny and overwhelmingly talented.” TED speaker and National Poetry Slam Champion Clint Smith is the author of Counting Descent (Write Bloody, 2016), which Gregory Pardlo says “shimmer[s] with revelatory intensity.” Called a “master storyteller” by George Higgins, Pushcart Prize nominee John Warner Smith is the author of A Mandala of Hands (Aldrich Press, 2015) and the new collection Soul Be a Witness: Songs to Boys of Color (MadHat Press, 2016). Free and open to the public. Refreshments served. Co-sponsored by The New School Creative Writing Program.

Casey Rocheteau is a poet, historian and educator. The inaugural winner of Write A House permanent residency in Detroit in 2014, she has attended Callaloo Creative Writers Workshop, Cave Canem, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Sicily. She teaches poetry in high schools through InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit and is an editor-in-chief at Kinfolks Quarterly and Heart Online Journal. Her second poetry collection, The Dozen, was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2016.

Clint Smith is a writer and doctoral candidate at Harvard University. A 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and a speaker at the 2015 TED Conference, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Guardian, Boston Review, Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Counting Descent (Write Bloody, 2016).

John Warner Smith has published two collections of poetry, most recently, Soul Be A Witness (MadHat Press 2016), a book that goes beyond history and contemporary influences to capture the inner struggles shaping a black boy’s journey toward manhood and selfhood. Terrance Hayes calls Smith’s debut collection A Mandala of Hands (Aldrich Press, 2015) “a mature and magical new book.” Smith’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for the Sundress Best of the Net Anthology. A Cave Canem fellow, Smith earned his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. His poetry can be found at www.johnwarnersmith.com.