Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady is the author of several books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather (Penguin, 2008), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His other titles are Kartunes (Warthog Press, 1980); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Press, 1986), winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991), nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don’t Miss Your Water (Henry Holt and Co., 1995); The Autobiography of a Jukebox (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997); Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001); the mixed media book/cds Book of Hooks (Kattywompus Press, 2013); Singing While Black (Kattywompus Press, 2015), and The War Against the Obvious (Jacar Press, 2018). His work appears in many journals, magazines, and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, (1750-2000) ed. Michael S. Harper.

With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. In 2023, he and Derricote were the inaugural recipients of The Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry. Eady was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2026. In 2025, Eady received the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement in Poetry; in 2024, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Furious Flower. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature (1985); a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, (1993); among many other distinguished awards. Eady has taught poetry at SUNY Stony Brook, where he directed its Poetry Center; City College; Sarah Lawrence College; New York University; The Writer’s Voice; The 92nd St Y; The College of William and Mary; Sweet Briar College; and The University of Missouri-Columbia. Eady has been a teacher for over twenty years, and is currently the Chair of Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Most recently, Eady read his commissioned poem, “Proof,” at NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration on January 1, 2026.