Celebrate Black poets this month and all months! Join us on Tuesday, February 22, 2022, at 6:00 p.m. ET as poets Linda Susan Jackson, Maya Marshall, and Afaa Weaver read a selection of their poems and discuss Cave Canem throughout its fruitful twenty-five years. Linda, Maya, and Afaa relate the influence Cave Canem has had on their own work and the work of others as a safe haven for Black creators to realize their full potential. With introduction by Dante Micheaux, Cave Canem’s twenty-fifth anniversary curator and artistic advisor. Thank you to The Givens Foundation for African American Literature for sponsoring this Black History Month event.

The premiere of this Virtual AWP event will also include a live Q&A on YouTube. To participate in the live Q&A, you must be signed in on YouTube.

Participant bios

Linda Susan Jackson is the author of Truth Be Told (Four Way Books, forthcoming) and What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha Press, 2007), a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Paterson Prize. She has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Calabash International Literary Festival, Soul Mountain Writers Retreat, and The Frost Place. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and Brilliant Corners, among others, and has been featured on the Academy of American Poets and Poetry Poem-a-Day series. She’s a retired associate professor of English from Medgar Evers College/CUNY.

Maya Marshall, a writer and editor, is cofounder of underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. An educator, Marshall has served as artist in residence at Northwestern University and as faculty for the Loyola University Chicago creative writing program. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Watering Hole, Community of Writers, and Cave Canem. She is the author of the chapbook Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) and of the full-length poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love (Haymarket Books, 2022). Marshall serves as the 2021–2023 Emory University Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Marshall is an editor at Haymarket Books. 

Afaa Weaver's most recent collection of poetry is Spirit Boxing (University of Pittsburgh, 2017). In April 2023, Red Hen will publish his sixteenth collection of poetry, A Fire in the Hills. His awards include the Gold Friendship Medal from the Beijing Writers Association (2005), the St. Botolph Club Distinguished Artist Award (2019), and the 96th Medal from Taiwan's Writers and Artists Association (2019). Afaa was first faculty at Cave Canem in 1996 and 1997. In 1998, he became the first Elder of the organization. He is professor emeritus at Simmons University. At Sarah Lawrence he teaches occasionally as a member of the MFA faculty.

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus (Indolent Books, 2018), which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010). His poems and translations have appeared in African American Review; the American Poetry Review; Callaloo; Literary Imagination; Poem-A-Day; Poetry; PN Review; and Tongue, among other journals and anthologies. Micheaux’s other honors include the 2020 Ambit Magazine Poetry Prize and a fellowship from the New York Times Foundation. He is the thirty-first recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency. Micheaux is a fellow and currently serves as guest curator and artistic advisor of Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.