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 Harryette Mullen, Remica Bingham-Risher, and Frank X Walker.
Join us June 9 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
Harryette Mullen’s latest books are Regaining Unconsciousness (Graywolf, 2025), Open Leaves / poems from earth (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2023), and a critical edition of her poetry, Her Silver-Tongued Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Others include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be (University of Alabama, 2012), received an Elizabeth Agee Award. Graywolf Press published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary in 2013. Her visual art collages have appeared in About Place, Air/Light, Jet Fuel Review, and Obsidian.
Harryette Mullen teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA. Her poems, short stories, and essays are published widely and reprinted in over one hundred anthologies, including several published by Norton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin presses. Her work appears in Best of Callaloo and was selected six times for the Best American Poetry anthology series edited by David Lehman with guest editors A.R. Ammons, Robert Hass, Terrance Hayes, Robert Pinsky, Elaine Equi, and Mary Jo Salter. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2023, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Hungarian, Kyrgyz, and Vietnamese.
Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Callaloo, and Essence. She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013), shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and adapted into an immersive dance and installation work by INSPIRIT Dance Company; and Starlight & Error (Diode, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award. She is an in-demand speaker at festivals, libraries, bookstores, colleges, and universities and has been a featured performer at the Kennedy Center, Dodge Poetry Festival, and numerous other venues. Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up, was published by Beacon Press (2022). Her newest book, Room Swept Home, is a work of poems, historical, and family photographs from Wesleyan University Press (2024). She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, where she resides with her husband and children.
Multidisciplinary artist and educator, Frank X Walker, is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the NAACP Image Award; Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; and his latest, Load In Nine Times. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. He serves as a Professor of Creative Writing & African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.
