The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment

Dispatch

Sympathetic Little Monster

Located in western Massachusetts, UMass Amherst is the flagship campus of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' five-campus University of Massachusetts system. UMass Amherst is a nationally recognized teaching and research institution with a current enrollment of about 28,500 students.

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and a scholar of trans theory/expressive culture. His writing and teaching creatively combine trans/feminist/queer theory, disability studies, black studies, and poetry and other forms of experimental writing to explore transgender aesthetics and cultural production, the conflicted histories of trans/feminist/queer thought in the U.S., and collective affect/feeling.

Trans Theory

Trans Expressive Culture

Trans/Feminist/Queer Theory and Methods

Disability Studies

Contemporary American Literature

Poetry

UMass Amherst Faculty Profile

Personal Website

In The Terrible We, Cameron Awkward-Rich Makes Space for Bad Trans Feelings

5 Black Male Poets Whose Words Enthrall Us

Poems of provocation

Associate Professor in the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program

In this episode of The Poetry Vlog (TPV), Cameron Awkward-Rich reads the poem "Black Feeling" from his book Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) to lead a discussion on the dialectical complexity within Black and trans social identities. The  poem expands on an encounter he has while in transit on the bus with an elder retired cop to contemplate uneven, overlapping, and even paradoxical power dynamics around race, gender, class,  sex, sexuality, and education. This episode will be re-edited and adapted with a Critical Framing and sample lesson plans in The Poetry Vlog: Critical Edition. Forthcoming from University of Michigan Press, Fulcrum.

Cameron Awkward-Rich holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and, in  addition to Dispatch, is author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016). Learn more at https://www.cawkwardrich.com/.

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The Poetry Vlog, also known as "TPV" is a teaching YouTube Channel and Podcast dedicated to building social justice coalitions through arts, scholarship, and higher education dialogues. The project collaborations make evident the lived experiences of poets and scholars while sustaining both the amplification and archive of shared resources. Guests range from Pulitzer Poet Jericho Brown to C. R.'s own students. Each episode and season across topics and guests remain guided by a simple belief: "Hope is not just a feeling, but a call to action, and poetry, as always, is already here to meet it."

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Cameron Awkward-Rich on Writing Poetry 'In the Break' of Black and Trans Dialectics

Cameron Awkward-Rich (he/him/his) reads his poem, “Cento Between the Ending and the End.”

Cameron Awkward-Rich:
https://twitter.com/cawkward_rich
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https://www.cawkwardrich.com

Brought to you by Complexly, The Poetry Foundation, and curators Charlotte Abotsi and Sarah Kay. Learn more: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/

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Cameron Awkward-Rich reads "Cento Between the Ending and the End"

A celebration of the seventieth anniversary of Ralph Ellison's seminal text "Invisible Man"

Live from the Langston Hughes Auditorium on March 1, 2023.

In celebration of the seventieth anniversary of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Cave Canem commissioned poets Cameron Awkward-Rich, Kadeem Gayle, and Lorelei Williams to create ekphrastic poems inspired by the novel and Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture Invisible Man: A Memorial to Ralph Ellison (2003). Join us for an exploration of poetic contributions that have reframed the narrative around the book by focusing on houselessness, incarceration, and femme, trans, and LGBTQ identifying people. The evening will include conversation and readings.

POETS
Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry—Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019)—as well as The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). His writing has appeared, in various forms, in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Signs, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and the ACLS. Presently, he is an assistant professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Kadeem Gayle is a patient advocate, poet, and medical humanist of Jamaican descent, born in Boston, Massachusetts. At three years old, Gayle was diagnosed with sickle cell disease (SCD), a rare genetic blood disorder that causes a serious range of health issues. Despite the challenges of living with SCD, Gayle has found positive ways to live and cope with his illness. Gayle is currently a doctoral candidate at Drew University studying medical and health humanities. Gayle started writing poetry at the age of fifteen and has found writing to be a positive outlet that promotes healing and humanizes the SCD experience. Gayle has written for the Republican newspaper of Springfield, Massachusetts. Gayle is currently a credentialed Independent Patient Advocate through the Sickle Cell Community Consortium. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Adelphi University and is a third-year Cave Canem Fellow.

Lorelei Williams is a poet, philanthropic strategist, and proud mama. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Warner Music Group/Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund and has spent her career committed to Black liberation and social justice movement building across the United States and African Diaspora. Williams’s writings have appeared in Essence, Meridians, Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, and African Voices, and in the anthologies Be the Dream (Algonquin Books, 2003); Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry for the 21st Century (Black Classic Press, 2002); Cave Canem III (Black Classic Press); and Guerreras y Cimmaronas (University of Houston Arte Publico Press, 2012). She is a graduate of Yale and Harvard universities and a member of the inaugural class of Cave Canem poets.

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Cameron Awkward-Rich

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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