Cave Canem Presents: The 2025 Annual Faculty Reading at City of Asylum

In the 1990s, esteemed Pittsburgh poet Toi Derricotte, a dear friend of City of Asylum, co-founded Cave Canem with Cornelius Eady to support and celebrate Black poets. For over a decade, City of Asylum has hosted Cave Canem’s annual Faculty Reading each June, coinciding with their week-long retreat at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The retreat residency offers poets an unparalleled opportunity to study with a world-class faculty and join a community of peers with whom they may improve their craft and find productive space. This year’s reading presents esteemed faculty and world-class poets A. Van Jordan, Matthew Shenoda, and Joy Priest.

Cave Canem is a nonprofit organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets. Founded by artists for artists, Cave Canem fosters community across the diaspora to enrich the field by facilitating a nurturing space in which to learn, experiment, create, and present. Cave Canem develops audiences for Black voices that have worked and are working in the craft of poetry.

About the Poets:

Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry: Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics (2007); and The Cineaste (W.W. Norton & Co, 2013). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). His latest collection, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, was released in June 2023 by W.W. Norton & Co. Among his many academic appointments, he most recently served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan. Currently, he holds the Humanities and Sciences Chair in English and serves as part of the inaugural faculty in the Department of African & African American Studies at Stanford University.

Matthew Shenoda is the author of the poetry collections Somewhere Else, Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, Tahrir Suite, and The Way of the Earth, and is the co-editor of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Literary Arts and affiliated faculty in Africana Studies and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. Additionally, Shenoda is currently faculty for Cave Canem and a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund and both the African Poetry Book Series and the On African Poetry series.

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, an Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems, essays, and criticism have appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Sewanee Review, among others. She teaches on faculty in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and serves as the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).\

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for dinner from 5 to 10 pm. To make a reservation, please visit Open Table or call 412-435-1111.