Toi Derricotte

Poet, educator, and memoirist Toi Derricotte has written six collections of poetry: "I": New and Selected Poems (2019), a 2019 National Book Awards finalist; The Undertaker’s Daughter (2011); Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); Tender (1997), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; and The Empress of the Death House (1978), a collection that draws on her early experiences at her grandparents’ funeral home in Detroit. Her prose collection, The Black Notebooks (1997) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction. 

Derricotte is a recipient of the 2023 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry. She has received numerous honors and awards for her collections of poetry and contributions to literature, including the Academy of American Poets’ 2021 Wallace Stevens Award; the 2020 Frost Medal from The Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry; the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement; the PEN/Voelcker Award; two Pushcart Prizes; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim, and the Maryland State Arts Council. More than 1,000 of Derricotte’s poems have been published in magazines and journals, including American Poetry Review, Callaloo, the New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

The poet Marilyn Hacker described Toi Derricotte’s poems as “honest, fine-honed, deceptively simple … deadly accurate, ‘more merciless to herself than history’ [and] as unique as her point of view. And it is the specificity, the fine observation of that viewpoint … which make[s] it at once accessible and revelatory to readers, whatever their origins, whatever their preconceptions of the possibilities of poetry.”

Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, and earned a BA from Wayne State University and an MA in English literature from New York University. In 1996, she co-founded Cave Canem, an organization committed to furthering artistic and professional opportunities for Black poets, with poet Cornelius Eady. Cave Canem won the 2016 National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Derricotte served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012–2017. She is a professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh.