Collective Futures: Writing Our Worlds
Since Cave Canem was established in 1996, its model of mentorship and fellowship has inspired a host of other organizations dedicated to the development of poets of color. In light…
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Black Poetry, American Sign Language, and Access: An Interview with Cynthia Norman
As the Coronavirus pandemic pushed many organizations and industries to convert to online platforms rather quickly, the need to center disability and access in everyday practices took center stage. The…
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Meet Development Intern Sonjirose Chin
In fall 2020, Sonjirose Chin started as a development intern at Cave Canem through her participation in the City University of New York (CUNY) Cultural Corps. The program provides internship…
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“Books I read at 3 a.m.: Pablo Neruda and Metta Sáma” by Jaqueline Johnson
We are living in a time of profound change which has affected our day-to-day lives and the ways of working, creating, governing and teaching. Many people are experiencing high levels…
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Poet of the Week: Amber Flora Thomas
Rattlesnake Having eaten your head clean off, my cat drops your plump carcass on the doormat. Between blood and purple clots, a bit of neck bone insists on the air.…
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Poet of the Week: Laura Swearingen-Steadwell
processional he lifts my grandmother’s body a sheaf of reeds he picked himself, cattails rustling in the wind he carries her as though he meant to make something useful, to…
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Poet of the Week: Christina Springer
Dinner Party In Yellow serving people fixture the mahogany paneled mansions with glass stained, hidden stairs, trap doors, floor board foot buzzers we freely imagine ourselves Persian ~ one flaw…
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Poet of the Week: John Warner Smith
Parted When I was ten years old my stepfather fished a sparkling new Schwinn bicycle out of the coulee bordering our back yard. All the boys knew it had been…
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Poet of the Week: Danez Smith
“Ooooh, you look like” usually heard in the context of trying to receive services from a service industry employee when you make it to the front of the line &…
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Poet of the Week: Nicole Sealey
A Violence You hear the high-pitched yowls of strays fighting for scraps tossed from a kitchen window. They sound like children you might have had. Had you wanted children. Had…
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Poet of the Week: Aaron Samuels
Joy My dad gave me an ice cream cone the first time I was suspended from school. Let’s cut to the chase— racism. My only mistake was that I played…
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Poet of the Week: Lauren Russell
Transitive Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. … The Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. —H.D. I am always the…
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Poet of the Week: Alison C. Rollins
Why Is We Americans We is gator teeth hanging from the rear- view mirror as sickle cells suckle at Big Momma’s teats. We is dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond.…
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Poet of the Week: Breauna L. Roach
For the 15 year old stowaway who survived a flight in the barrel of a jet They say you should have frozen. Your body found on the next routine inspection…
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Poet of the Week: Rachel Nelson
Fable After Kara Walker’s Freedom: A fable (1997) Perhaps she would begin with the sea (where did it go?), or the sweet dim reprieve from the sun, or the rain she…
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Poet of the Week: Tracie Morris
Blackout 1977 Red hued brick and siding holding porous heat, stars blazed out Adjacent to the round-top cement building, a former synagogue We sat around eating fried food in our…
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Poet of the Week: Jonathan Moody
DEAR 2Pac, I begin with Byron & Tennyson & watch my students bury their heads on desks; they rest easier than the deceased. Dear 2Pac, it’s me against the world…
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Poet of the Week: Kyla Marshell
THE PENELOPE METAPHOR I forgot to mention: I’m in love. It can’t work. At least that’s what I hear about these inter-borough romances. We are separated by bridges and rivers,…
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Poet of the Week: Nate Marshall
Oregon Trail for my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks my first venture west was in Windows 98 or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab & we were supposed to…
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Poet of the Week: Kwoya Fagin Maples
HEAVEN BOUND “All of my children have died or wandered away.”- Alabama Slave Narratives Here are the milk and songs from my breast. Here is his cover sewed from calico…
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Poet of the Week: Cynthia Manick
Mind the Gap Little E wants a smile like mine, teeth with a gap so wide a corn husk and tugboat could pull through. Or a submarine, lost sounds and…
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Poet of the Week: Alan King
I wanted Bananas— a bunch of them spooned body to body like small yellow kayaks. So I missed what you said about the war in Libya. When you say Gaddafi,…
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Poet of the Week: M. Nzadi Keita
Attic Window “[Ottilie Assing’s] letters to Douglass, which she wrote as a lover of more than twenty years, celebrated a familiar rich sensuality.” – Maria Diedrich Those Tuesdays when I…
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Poet of the Week: Amanda Johnston
BOWING IN THE CHURCH OF BEAUTY Hymns are swinging low from a cassette boom-box pulsing between dusty bottles of curl activator and ancient blow out kits made new in the…
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Poet of the Week: Jacqueline Johnson
The Last Rain Queen Your life was community property. Your will a kind of “nkisi” meant to serve other interests, never your own. Your actions were to be dictated by…
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Poet of the Week: Brandon D. Johnson
amused I turn corners hoping to smack into you. I wait in subways for your escalator-hum sashay. I save a seat in stadiums yearning your long fingered caress when we…
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Poet of the Week: Brionne Janae
POSTCARD: BILLY HARRISON SPEAKS For Laura Nelson 1878-1911 when they had done with her and the torches were extinguished with dew, and she lay like something decaying in mulch, blood…
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Poet of the Week: Gary Allen Jackson
Goliath We prop the body up but it blocks the sky. If we lay it down, we’d have to uproot too many trees, and we cannot leave him in the…
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Poet of the Week: Darrel Alejandro Holnes
The Art of Diplomacy The diplomat kids at the international school were all from somewhere else, and those of us who weren’t, needed to be so I pulled a Sean…
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Poet of the Week: Sean Hill
Bemidji Blues for Arnold Rampersad Shadows bluing the snow, the pines’ and mine,bear the cast of a kestrel’s blue-grey crownI note as I find my way about this town. Blues…
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Poet of the Week: Shayla Hawkins
TREASURE after Vievee Francis’s “Epicurean” A broad chest, a barrel chest, chest that Atlas wished to have before he hefted the world’s weight onto his shoulders. A chest that I…
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Poet of the Week: Alysia Nicole Harris
CROW’S SUGAR I stole a watermelon from your kitchen. I must have been about 18. I’m thinking of a black-eyed angel. The other boys said you wasn’t worth your salt…
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Poet of the Week: Carmen Gillespie
the blue black wet of wood Today’s rain is blue, a blue of skeletons and the underside of ashes. My footsteps pool in azure and the sea seeps through in…
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Poet of the Week: Jonterri Gadson
Rapture (Sonnet #1) On a Saturday morning in Palm Beach, middle-aged poets read stanzas of grief. Now I know it will always be too soon for my mother to die. …
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Letter from the Executive Director
Dear Cave Canem Family & Friends, As we look toward the 25th anniversary, it is remarkable to think that Cave Canem was once just an idea of our forward-thinking founders…
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Poet of the Week: Naomi Extra
When the Protest is Lonely (Madison, WI 2011) Capitol. For the I in consciousness, for when your feet Are muddied into the ground. This is what democracy looks like? Tell…
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Poet of the Week: Chiyuma Elliott
Fruit Tree If we are at war let the orchards show it, let the pear and fig fall prior to their time, let the radios die –Katie Ford, “Our Long…
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Poet of the Week: Safia Elhillo
second quarantine with abdelhalim hafez the lyrics do not translate arabic is all verbs for what stays still in other languages تصبح to morning what the translation to awake cannot honor …
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Poet of the Week: Natasha Ria El-Scari
The Secret Life of Black Mothers I No indictment no peace Oh the feeling of when you don’t even have a poem in your heart. Just jumbled sounds and letters,…
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Poet of the Week: Mary Moore Easter
The Activist You Don’t See What you don’t see in the photo of me standing beside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is my brown naked body limbs bent to match the…
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Poet of the Week: Dustin Pearson
The Thawing Season There are times when the door to Mom’s bedroom doesn’t open. Sometimes, it lasts for months. Frost creeps from the floor tiles to the walls, but her…
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Poet of the Week: Maurice Decaul
In The Meantime The gods looking down from safety resume their dispute about humans the interventionists argue for decisive but limited action fire plague, while the pusillanimous remind the…
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Poet of the Week: Geffrey Davis
King County Metro In Seattle, in 1982, my mother beholds this man boarding the bus, the one she’s already turning into my father. His style (if you can call it…
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Poet of the Week: Teri Cross Davis
Haint no amount of dilation and suction hemorrhaging and fever could’ve erased you or the pulp of your carved initials made with the solid grasp of a still forming hand…
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Poet of the Week: Kristiana Rae Colón
a remix for remembrance for my students This is for the boys whose bedrooms are in the basement, who press creases into jeans, who carve their names in pavement, the…
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Poet of the Week: Adrienne Christian
dog in a dead man’s house I was a dog in a dead man’s house. I was a tooth in a dead man’s mouth. I was a rat in a…
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Poet of the Week: Cortney Lamar Charleston
In Theory, We Are All Human Not a simple thing, no. Not to be taken lightly. To be understood, and I do, that is, get the theory of you:…
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Poet of the Week: Robin Caudell
Bass Line Patrice I know the rock From which you were carved The Archangel harping ‘Round your base Fire in your obsidian eyes Stoke a passion, a potential so Magnificent…
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Poet of the Week: James Cagney
The Fire in Her Eyes Redefines an Apple The ritual of fruit beings again in June when buckets of smiling plums and blistered peaches arrive for her in cars altering our…
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Poet of the Week: CM Burroughs
Our People II All cousins know the electric slide/ how to spell/despite the stink of it/chitterlings or chitlins/the odor of pig feet or catfish under a steam of vinegar/ believe blood is…
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Poet of the Week: Gloria Burgess
blessing the light after blessing the boats, by Lucille Clifton for our young people and their teachers may the stars that shimmer even now beneath the surface of our knowing…
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Poet of the Week: Jericho Brown
Labor I spent what light Saturday sent sweating And learned to cuss cutting grass for women Kind enough to say they couldn’t tell the damned Difference between their mowed…
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Poet of the Week: drea brown
flesh memory: an invocation in cento from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Akilah Oliver’s She Said Dialogues: Flesh Memory, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who… the world is wrong. you can’t put the past…
Read MorePhoto Gallery: A Cocktail with Cave Canem
We thank you for attending “A Cocktail with Cave Canem” on Thursday, November 29 at Osteria 57. Below, please enjoy a gallery of photographs from the evening.
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Poet of the Week: Derrick Wetson Brown
A Poem for Peter of The Snowy Day You are a bright red cardinal feather Peter. You are me. A brown boy who scales mountains and slides down slopes of…
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Poet of the Week: Remica Bingham-Risher
Gratitude Each time I enter Autumn Care Nursing Home residents line the glistening beige tile. I walk past the nurses’ station—three, on duty, sitting behind the glass. None moving to…
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Poet of the Week: Samiya Bashir
Blackbody Curve Stairs: a rushed flight down thirty-eight; French doors unlocked always. Always: a lie; an argument. Argument: two buck hunters circle a meadow’s edge. Edge: one of us outside…
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Poet of the Week: Cameron Awkward-Rich
All my friends are sad & bright. I think door & there is. Open & here’s a room where everything you’ve lost is washed ashore. We’ve seen the news. We know the story. How…
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Poet of the Week: Keith S. Wilson
A SHORT LIST OF GRIEVANCES First, you are invisible, which is another word for Jesus she’s gone. Second, the medulla oblongata makes you automatic, so even when I am not…
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Poet of the Week: Phillip B. Williams
Selvage A Rottweiler is the shadow of an angel of vengeance. The dog blows out a star’s light while scratching its ribs. It augers the fallen leaves like tarot, decodes…
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Poet of the Week: Lorelei Williams
Maroon Woman Run child past knives whips chains rape. Sold South. Don’t know your real name. Nor birth date. Sound of shame form in your mouth when your love come see how…
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Poet of the Week: Jacqueline Allen Trimble
Nat Turner Returns for His Stolen Parts and Finds a Sermon of Rage Nat Turner makes the slow trek through the attics of America. He wishes to pull himself together.…
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Poet of the Week: Anastacia-Reneé Tolbert
Cow Girl the family pictures on the wall did not resemble the little polaroid girl she was & she was not the kind of woman who froze frame or posed…
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Poet of the Week: Samantha Thornhill
Most Beautiful Accident: A Single Parent’s Ode I imagine the day you will ask me: why is our life that Bill Withers song, just the two of us? You’ll…
Read More Poet of the Week: Amber Flora Thomas
A Wild Thing If you thought there was sorrow in the bear, its one-eyed gaze from inside her teeth, shook against her jowls, and slobbered upon. If you thought there…
Read More Poet of the Week: Laura Swearingen-Steadwell
processional he lifts my grandmother’s body a sheaf of reeds he picked himself, cattails rustling in the wind he carries her as though he meant to make something useful, to…
Read More Poet of the Week: Christina Springer
Them Ghosts them ghosts gonna respect no privacy or tenderness hobble they tires like runaways pick out suspension busting potholes cut strings like ham sing the stillborn song holler down…
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Poet of the Week: John Warner Smith
Zydeco on Dog Hill Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in…
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Poet of the Week: Danez Smith
at the down low house party don’t expect no nigga to dance. we drink Hen, hold the wall graze an elbow & pray it last forever. everybody wants to touch…
Read More Poet of the Week: Nicole Sealey
A Violence You hear the high-pitched yowls of strays fighting for scraps tossed from a kitchen window. They sound like children you might have had. Had you wanted children. Had…
Read More Poet of the Week: Aaron Samuels
Joy My dad gave me an ice cream cone the first time I was suspended from school. Let’s cut to the chase— racism. My only mistake was that I played…
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Poet of the Week: Lauren Russell
Transitive Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. … The Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. —H.D. I am always the…
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Poet of the Week: Alison C. Rollins
Why Is We Americans We is gator teeth hanging from the rear- view mirror as sickle cells suckle at Big Momma’s teats. We is dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond.…
Read More Poet of the Week: Breauna L. Roach
For the 15 year old stowaway who survived a flight in the barrel of a jet They say you should have frozen. Your body found on the next routine inspection…
Read More Poet of the Week: Rachel Nelson
April You want to be the sort of woman who steps out of her boots and slides her leg into the dark water without stutter. You want your own beauty…
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Poet of the Week: Tracie Morris
Blackout 1977 Red hued brick and siding holding porous heat, stars blazed out Adjacent to the round-top cement building, a former synagogue We sat around eating fried food in our…
Read More Jonathan Moody: Poet of the Week
Paranoid I’ve passed down my fear of the police to my baby boy who always sleeps, frozen, with his hands in the air. Corralling around dancing clouds, Lil’ Bo Peep’s…
Read More Poet of the Week: Kyla Marshell
THE PENELOPE METAPHOR I forgot to mention: I’m in love. It can’t work. At least that’s what I hear about these inter-borough romances. We are separated by bridges and rivers,…
Read More Poet of the Week: Nate Marshall
Oregon Trail for my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks my first venture west was in Windows 98 or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab & we were supposed to…
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The National Endowment for the Arts Finds that Poetry Reading is on the Rise
Brooklyn, NY (June 8, 2018)— Yesterday, the National Endowment for the Arts released information confirming that poetry reading is on the rise. Specifically, according to the NEA’s Director of Research and Analysis…
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Poet of the Week: Kwoya Fagin Maples
HEAVEN BOUND “All of my children have died or wandered away.” – Alabama Slave Narratives Here are the milk and songs from my breast. Here is his cover sewed from…
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Poet of the Week: Cynthia Manick
Blue Hallelujahs from the Hand after Carrie Mae Weems Kitchen Table Series In the right light I’m beautiful. Covered in flour and paprika balled cubes of meat, you can…
Read More Poet of the Week: Alan King
Swarm In a mob of school kids, two boys shove each other before they’re on the ground. They jab at air and grass, missing the jaw, cheek and eye. A…
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Poet of the Week: Amanda Johnston
DOMICILE a chair is not a house and a house is not a home when there’s no one there to hold you tight. ~ Luther Vandross Tucked under an overpass…
Read More Poet of the Week: Jacqueline Johnson
Carolina Legato (for Edna Robinson) Most Saturday afternoons found you in the parlor room. John Thompson piano riffs resonating through closed doors. Worked your magic on some young soul who…
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Poet of the Week: Brandon D. Johnson
amused I turn corners hoping to smack into you. I wait in subways for your escalator-hum sashay. I save a seat in stadiums yearning your long fingered caress when we…
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Poet of the Week: Brionne Janae
CUTTING again the blessed sunday bird went to fire whole. your momma, all shined in her church things turned over the shanty, she hunting for that good butcher knife all…
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Poet of the Week: Gary Jackson
Elegy that was already done before I’m trying to teach these kids about elegy when one of them asks how do you grieve? Everyone answers: crying, screaming in the crook of your…
Read More Poet of the Week: Darrel Alejandro Holnes
I Always Promised I’d Never Do Drag You liked me as straight as a man in love with another could ever be, and I did too. But you also loved…
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Poet of the Week: Shayla Hawkins
MOJO WORKING Detroit, Michigan, circa 1980 Rhythm pulling me like a magnet to the door outside my father’s den and The Electrifying Mojo, deejay of deejays, talking smooth and deep…
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Poet of the Week: Alysia Nicole Harris
CROW’S SUGAR I stole a watermelon from your kitchen. I must have been about 18. I’m thinking of a black-eyed angel. The other boys said you wasn’t worth your salt…
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Poet of the Week: Naomi Extra
We Was Good When Sandy hit I was sittin’ up in my apartment comfortable & shit cuz my moms went shoppin’ the day before. She took us all, like me…
Read More Poet of the Week: Chiyuma Elliott
Second Life Words are tricky as paper. Fast as your hands can move, they can fold into a crane or a frog, a hat or a fish. Even though you…
Read More Poet of the Week: Safia Elhillo
the lovers khartoum in the eighties my mother with ribbons in her hair dress fanning about her nutmeg calves my father who i hear was so lively & handsome that…
Read More Poet of the Week: Natasha Ria El-Scari
Tweak There is a rumbling and stuff starts to ruin fall apart like your favorite kindergarten shirt like your marriage like your transmission during the final payment it all feels…
Read More Poet of the Week: Mary Moore Easter
The Activist You Don’t See What you don’t see in the photo of me standing beside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is my brown naked body limbs bent to match the…
Read More Poet of the Week: Maurice Decaul
Quotidian The baby is a creature of habit, every morning a slice of toast a smear of peanut butter, a little extra on her spoon. White table grapes when in…
Read More Poet of the Week: Geffrey Davis
King County Metro In Seattle, in 1982, my mother beholds this man boarding the bus, the one she’s already turning into my father. His style (if you can call it…
Read More Poet of the Week: Teri Cross Davis
Fade to Black Only now can pixels completely capture the mulatto ancestors born in Virginia, the freedmen of Georgia, the sharecroppers in Lafayette County, Arkansas, the winters yellowing successive generations…
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Poet of the Week: Kristiana Rae Colón
what i mean when i say vigil Purge: the living need to purge, forge a ring of wailing, fire a womb of grief, fur of teddy bears to mildew in…
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Poet of the Week: Adrienne Christian
how i got over – for marvin bell and t’ai freedom ford i imagined sisyphus happy. that great big boulder would give me beautiful shoulders. that steepest of hills would give…
Read More Poet of the Week: Cortney Lamar Charleston
Melanophobia: Fear of Black How the moon, sometimes, is a scythe of hard enamel, sign that somebody may be left better-headless in the dark. How the threat’s description is…
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Poet of the Week: Robin Caudell
Genetic Jazz (For Harjo) Joy Silvers Soprano-sax poems Blue-blacking Muskogee hearts Raven wings Joy Raps true Slaps hypocrite MITT (More Indian Than Thou) Who squint down Not so brown or…
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Poet of the Week: CM Burroughs
DEAR INCUBATOR At six months gestation, I am a fabrication born far too soon. My body, a stone in a steaming basket. I remember you. —[Figureless] —A black kaleidoscope. Turn. …
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Poet of the Week: Gloria Burgess
blessing the light after blessing the boats, by Lucille Clifton for our young people and their teachers may the stars that shimmer even now beneath the surface of our knowing…
Read More Poet of the Week: Jericho Brown
Labor I spent what light Saturday sent sweating And learned to cuss cutting grass for women Kind enough to say they couldn’t tell the damned Difference between their mowed lawns…
Read More Poet of the Week: drea brown
flesh memory: an invocation in cento from claudia rankine’s citizen and akilah oliver’s she said dialogues: flesh memory, ntozake shange’s for colored girls who… the world is wrong. you can’t put the past behind you.…
Read More Derrick Weston Brown: Poet of the Week
At the VA The man who shares a room with my father titters and jerks under the covers of his bed. His hair is wet and silver corn silk slivers…
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Remica Bingham-Risher: Poet of the Week
Conduit Science says we are not autonomous, we carry each other in our bowels and bellies, in our brains. Cells, microscopic parts of us passed through birthing or breast milk,…
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Samiya Bashir: Poet of the Week
A small matter of engineering The old water tower once stored every drop we lived on. Its walls dark capped bricked beige as supermarket pantyhose still rise erect astride the…
Read More Cameron Awkward-Rich: Poet of the Week
Theory of Motion (6), Nocturne for them all I’ve tried not to write about these ghosts. As if this too does not turn a child to narrative. As if this…
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Elizabeth Acevedo: Poet of the Week
Conversations My mother calls and sandbag sighs into another of her lists: She found Papi shivering inside a bottle of spiced rum. Again. My grandparent’s bills are loose napkins that…
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Phillip B. Williams: Poet of the Week
Selvage A Rottweiler is the shadow of an angel of vengeance. The dog blows out a star’s light while scratching its ribs. It augers the fallen leaves like tarot, decodes…
Read More Lorelei Williams: Poet of the Week
Identity I don’t want to be nobody’s poet- tree no sorry song no mystery no Billie’s blues no one drop rule no rebel muse Stop caging me I am my…
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Jacqueline Trimble: Poet of the Week
What if the Supreme Court Were Really the Supremes? Oh, how their bedazzled robes glisten as they glide into the courtroom, open wide their satin-gloved arms, flutter their long, store-bought eyelashes…
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Anastacia Renee Tolbert: Poet of the Week
Cow Girl the family pictures on the wall did not resemble the little polaroid girl she was & she was not the kind of woman who froze frame or posed…
Read More Christina Springer: Poet of the Week
Them Ghosts them ghosts gonna respect no privacy or tenderness hobble they tires like runaways pick out suspension busting potholes cut strings like ham sing the stillborn song holler down…
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John Warner Smith: Poet of the Week
Stars New Orleans, a Tuesday, 7:30 A.M. I’m sipping coffee at a McDonald’s on Canal when two young black men, early twenties perhaps, walk in, buying nothing. Suddenly, I’m aboard…
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Nicole Sealey: Poet of the Week
A Violence You hear the high-pitched yowls of strays fighting for scraps tossed from a kitchen window. They sound like children you might have had. Had you wanted children. Had…
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Aaron Samuels: Poet of the Week
Broken Ghazal in the Voice of My Brother Irrefutable fact / my brother is black jewish Kink hair & a wide nose / that’s gotta be black, jewish He said…
Read More Lauren Russell: Poet of the Week
Hair Her huffy histrionics take no heckling, that uppity puffed-up pastiche mishmash. The hellion half-breed’s hussyfooted a harvest, a windfall ensnarled in her miscegenated sassy nappery. Kink cringes at crumpling…
Read More Allison C. Rollins: Poet of the Week
Why Is We Americans We is gator teeth hanging from the rear- view mirror as sickle cells suckle at Big Momma’s teats. We is dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond.…
Read More Breauna L. Roach: Poet of the Week
Notes on a Myth of an Invasive Species “The African bee has the reputation of being more aggressive, and more deadly, than any other bee in the world. But farmers…
Read More Tracie Morris: Poet of the Week
Blackout 1977 Red hued brick and siding holding porous heat, stars blazed out Adjacent to the round-top cement building, a former synagogue We sat around eating fried food in our…
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Poetry Organizations from Across the U.S. Join Together to Form Historic Coalition & Launch March 2017 Programs on Migration
December 6, 2016—Twenty nonprofit poetry organizations from across the United States have formed a historic coalition dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and…
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