June 2021
Opening Circle: Memorial
The Cave Canem Retreat begins with an opening circle, where all 50 or so fellows, faculty, and staff share what brought them to the space. At once emotional, charged, and joyous, the opening circle breaks ground by inviting everyone to bring their full self to the week ahead and welcomes new fellows into a community of writers. In this spirit, poets from the Cave Canem Fellowship reflect on 25 years of being in community and pay tribute to former faculty…
Find out more »Let Me Tell You a Story: A Craft Lecture by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Let me tell a story. Let me show you what I see, what I dream, where I fall/fail and where it can sometimes hurt. And then let’s talk about how I’ve used languages, where I may have fallen into a couple of hiccups, what makes me write now with caution (which pisses me off) because I am older and younger. Let me tell you a story about a language that relies less on nouns and more verbs and thus, the…
Find out more »From Way Out Where: The Black Avant Garde
An evening of readings, fragments, ephemera, and conversation by some of America’s most vanguard black writers. Curated by the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh, and moderated by Yona Harvey, this event promises the off kilter, the quasi-unhinged, some black quakes, and some possible blackest futures. REGISTER HERE. Douglas Kearney has published seven books, including SHO (Wave, 2021) and Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award…
Find out more »Revelation
In this craft lecture, Roger Reeves thinks with and through revelation in poetry. What do we mean when we say something is revelatory in poetry? Is it epiphany, confession, statement, or all of the above? What makes a particularly efficacious revelation in a poem? And, what is our current relationship to revelation when we live in era, in a time that eschews privacy? These questions about revelation are also tied to questions of the transformative. How do we make transformative…
Find out more »City of Asylum / Cave Canem Faculty Readings, 2010-2014
Since 2010, Cave Canem has spent one day during the weeklong retreat at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh for daytime activities and an evening of faculty readings open to the public. This video collage of readings from the first five years of that partnership (2010-2014) highlights the rich diversity of poets who have taught at the retreat, and celebrates the treasured alliance of both organizations.
Find out more »“with love like black, our black”: Building Our Homes
In “The Sermon on the Warpland,” Gwendolyn Brooks urges readers to “Build now your church,” and to do so “With love like black, our black.” This roundtable features representatives from Cave Canem, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora in conversation about their collective histories and importance, the challenges they face, and the future of Black literary organizations. REGISTER HERE. This event is supported by American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and automated…
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