Cave Canem Retreat 2025: Faculty Reading at City of Asylum

Cave Canem supports the work of Black poets through a suite of core programs, including the Cave Canem Fellowship–which comes with a week-long residency of intensive poetry workshops and readings hosted at the University of Pittsburgh|Greensburg.

In tandem with this year’s retreat, Cave Canem is thrilled to host a public reading by our esteemed Faculty, featuring A. Van Jordan, Matthew Shenoda, and Joy Priest.

Join us June 12 at 7:30 PM ET to experience these world-class poets firsthand!

Access Notes:

• Virtual live-stream available
• ASL interpreter provided (in-person and live-stream)
• Closed captioning available for live-stream

About

A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); 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, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. 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 (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, before coming to Stanford University, where he currently holds the Humanities and Sciences Chair in English, and he also serves as part of the inaugural faculty in the Department of African & African American Studies.

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 co-editor of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden. Currently, 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 also currently faculty for Cave Canem and a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund and both the African Poetry book series and On African Poetry book series.

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is the recipient of 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).

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