Publishing-in-Transit: Cave Canem

Poet and playwright Malcolm Tariq is the author of Heed the Hollow (Graywolf Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2019 George Author of the Year Award, and Extended Play (2017). A graduate of Emory University, Tariq has a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is the Programs and Communications Manager at Cave Canem, a home for Black Poetry.

Poet Chekwube Danladi is the author of Semiotics (Georgia, 2020), winner of the 2019 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships and support from Callaloo, Kimbilio Fiction, Hedgebrook, Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Joint winner of the 2016 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, her chapbook Take Me Back was included in the New Generation African Poets 2017 boxset. She teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Poet and teaching artist Brionne Janae lives in Brooklyn. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021), which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017), published by Boaat Press. Brionne is the recipient of the St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook Alum, and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Their poetry has been published in Ploughshares, the American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, the Sun Magazine, jubilat, Waxwing, among others. Off the page they go by Breezy.

Nigerian poet, essayist, and editor Wale Ayinla is the author of To Cast a Dream (Jai-Alai Books, 2021), selected by Mahogany Browne for the 2020 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. His works have appeared in Guernica, South Dakota Review, TriQuarterly, Rhino Poetry, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is a staff reader for Adroit Journal. He has a Pushcart prize nomination and several Best of the Net and Best New Poets Award nominations, and in 2020, he was a finalist for numerous prizes which include the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. His manuscript, Sea Blues on Water Meridian was a finalist for the inaugural CAAPP Book Prize.

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.