Cornelius Eady

Poet and cofounder of Cave Canem Cornelius Eady’s published collections include Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Omnation Press, 1986), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008).

He is a recipient of the 2023 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry. In 1996, Eady and poet Toi Derricote founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization that supports emerging African American poets through summer retreats, regional workshops, first-book prizes, annual anthologies, and events and readings across the country. 

Brutal Imagination includes a sequence that responds to the notorious 1994 incident in which Susan Smith, a white woman from South Carolina, claimed that an African American man had kidnapped her children. The FBI searched for the man until Smith confessed the truth: she had invented him and had drowned her children. Eady’s sequence, which creates a detailed persona of the imaginary suspect, was adapted as an off-Broadway play that won the Newsday Oppenheimer Award. He has also collaborated with Diedre Murray on a libretto for a roots opera, Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Music, family, and the challenges unique to the African American experience are central themes of Eady’s work. In You Don’t Miss Your Water (1995), a prose-poem cycle of elegies for his father, traditional song titles from blues, jazz, and rock ’n’ roll serve as the titles of poems. Eady uses this naming convention in other collections as well. Of the musical references in his poetry, he says

I really enjoy the idea of the language that’s inside of music itself. The idea that maybe when you hear a jazz solo, or when you’re hearing a good saxophonist, or a guitarist, that you’re actually hearing that person’s story.

Eady’s ability to examine several stories at once while pairing the lyrical intersections of these lives to moments remarkable in their clarity, exuberance, and vulnerability has garnered critical acclaim. Poet June Jordan praised the way Eady “leads and then cuts a line like no one else: following the laughter and the compassionate path of a dauntless imagination, these poems beeline or zigzag always to the jugular.”

He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund. He is the Hodges chair at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.