Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin is a poet from Homestead, Florida. He is the author of the collectionsTenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Award; Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016), winner of the 2016 A. Poulin Jr. Prize; and a chapbook within the Strays Pack 5 collection (Foundlings Press, 2022).

His debut collection, Trouble the Water, was a finalist for a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and a Norma Farber First Book Award. Tenderness was a finalist for a Golden Poppy Award and a Northern California Book Award.

Austin’s poems, essays, and reviews have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, The Nation, American Literary Review, New England Review, Poetry London, Australian Book Review, and Image. He has had poems and essays commissioned by The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, Craft Contemporary, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, LAXART, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Austin earned a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Tampa and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Poetry and the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize. A Cave Canem fellow, Austin served as the 2022–2023 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar, the 2019–2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the 2016–2017 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing.