Cornelius Eady

Poet, playwright, and Cave Canem co-founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, New York, in 1954. He is the recipient of the 2025 Wallace Stevens Award, the top prize of the Academy of American Poets, the 2024 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, and the 2023 Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry from the Poetry Foundation. He has recently retired from his position as Professor of English and the John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a position previously held by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. He is the author of several collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry; and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the 2002 Oppenheimer Award for the best first play from an American playwright. Eady is also a songwriter; he performs with literary band the Cornelius Eady Trio, with whom he released the album Don't Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs (June Appal Recording, 2021). International media, including National Public Radio, BBC Radio 4, and PBS Newshour, have featured his work and songs. Other notable awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1996, Eady co-founded, with writer and Lannan awardee Toi Derricotte, the Cave Canem summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. More than a decade later, Cave Canem is a thriving national network of black poets and an institution that offers regional workshops, readings, a first-book prize, and the summer retreat. Lannan is honored to support Cave Canem's continued work.