Celebrating Black Poetry & 20 Years of Cave Canem

Full video of the event is available here.

Photos from the celebration are available here.

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Doors open at 5 p.m.
Performances start at 6 p.m.
A reception will follow

Tickets are available for purchase at online at kelly-strayhorn.org. 

The event will feature the following artists:

Duriel E. Harris, poet, performer, and sound artist, is the author of three poetry collections including the 2015 Nightboat Poetry Prize winning volume No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (forthcoming, 2017). Current undertakings include the conceptual work “Blood Labyrinth” and the solo performance project :Thingification:. Co-founder of the Call & Response performance ensemble, Harris is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University and Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.

 

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two poetry collections, the 2004 National Poetry Series award-winning  Leadbelly and Olio, heralded as "encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant" by Publisher's Weekly. The Library Journal has praised both books calling Leadbelly one of the “best poetry books of 2005" and Olio a "daring collection, which blends forthright, musically acute language with portraiture." Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Jess is Poetry and Fiction Editor of African American Review and Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island. Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

 

Camille Rankine's first book of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, was published in January by Copper Canyon Press. She is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship, and a recipient of a 2010 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Atlas Review, American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Octopus Magazine, Paper Darts, Phantom Books, A Public Space, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor at UMass Amherst, serves on the Executive Committee of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and lives in New York City.

 

Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, Voices of Our Nation (VONA) and elsewhere. He is a founding member of the multigenre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kinfolks and elsewhere. In poetry slam, he is a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion, and was on the 2014 championship team Sad Boy Supper Club. In 2014 he was the festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam, and he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar.

 

The event was sponsored by Kelly Strayhorn Theater and Ace Hotel Pittsburgh. 

Visit cavecanempoets.org for more information about the organization's 20 year history of "cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets."

Join us for the Pittsburgh Mini Book Fair on June 19, 2016, from noon–3 p.m. at the Ace Hotel Pittsburgh!