As many of you know, since 2010, June at City of Asylum means the return of one of the most popular annual poetry events in the city—Cave Canem’s Faculty Reading. This coincides with the week-long Cave Canem Retreat, their long-standing flagship program.

This year we are thrilled to host Cave Canem in person again at City of Asylum for this reading and celebration. This program features an evening of poetry with the decorated Faculty and Guest Poet of Cave Canem’s 26th Retreat for Black poets.

We hope that you will join us for the live reading that you won’t see anywhere else.

About the Retreat:

Cave Canem’s week-long Retreat is held annually at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Black poets of African descent, ages 21 and over, are eligible to apply. Once accepted, poets become “fellows.” Most are invited to attend two additional retreats within a five-year period.

Our retreat residency offers an unparalleled opportunity to study with a world-class faculty and join a community of peers. Some fellows hail from the spoken word tradition, others focus on the text. Some are formalists, others work at the cutting edge of experimentation. All are united by a common purpose to improve their craft and find productive space, as Harryette Mullen says, “where black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”

About the Poets:

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and The Yale Review. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Tracie Morris holds an MFA, a PhD, and has trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Dr. Morris was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before joining the Workshop as its first African-American tenured Professor of Poetry. Tracie has presented innovative poetry, performance art and theory in over 30 countries and is the author/editor of 10 books, three forthcoming. University creative fellowships include the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard and the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at UPenn. She is a Guggenheim Poetry Fellow, a Cave Canem alumna, and former board member and a Master Artist of the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Residencies include Millay, Yaddo and MacDowell colonies. She is also an experimental filmmaker and recording artist. Her installations and performances have been presented by the Whitney Biennial, Dia:Chelsea, The New Museum, The Kitchen Performance Space, Albertine, Furious Flower, Victoria and Albert Museum, Centre Pompidou, among others.

Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is an alumna of Old Dominion University and Bennington College. She is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Among other journals, her work has been published in the New York Times, the Writer’s Chronicle, New Letters, Callaloo and Essence. She is the author of Conversion winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award and Starlight & Error winner of the Diode Editions Book Award. Her newest work, and first book of prose, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions that Grew Me Up, will be published by Beacon Press in 2022. She is currently the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.