CAConrad

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. As a young poet, they lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis, as documented in the essay "SIN BUG: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia." The center of the Philadelphia poetry community at the time included Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, Essex Hemphill, and Gil Ott. Conrad’s other influences include Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Will Alexander, and Alice Notley.

In 2005, Conrad began working with (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals. The poems in their latest book, AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual in which Conrad flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. This book won the 2022 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the coronavirus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was. Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."

Conrad exhibits their poems as art objects in places such as Futura Gallery in Prague, the Robert Grunenberg Gallery in Berlin, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City, Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, and as part of the 2021 Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art. In 2022, Alex Alonso curated a solo exhibition of Conrad's poems in fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled "13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang's Return." In Brighton, England, their poem "Glitter in My Wounds" is the title of a new exhibition of emerging artists. 

Conrad’s The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010) is now available in nine different languages. Penguin UK will soon release a new edition of The Book of Frank and a selection of (Soma)tic poetry rituals and their resulting poems. Conrad is the author of many other books of poetry, which include While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017), ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books, 2012). Along with Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, Conrad coedited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015).

They received the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Book Award. Their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. They currently live in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and will teach at UMass, Amherst, in the MFA creative writing program from fall 2022 to spring 2023. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.