Cameron Awkward-Rich
Associate Professor in the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA, UNITED STATES
Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and a scholar of trans theory/expressive culture.
Expertise (6)
Trans Theory
Trans Expressive Culture
Trans/Feminist/Queer Theory and Methods
Disability Studies
Contemporary American Literature
Poetry
Biography
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.
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Education (2)
Stanford University: Ph.D., Modern Thought and Literature
Wesleyan University: B.A., English and Biology
Links (2)
Select Recent Media Coverage (3)
In The Terrible We, Cameron Awkward-Rich Makes Space for Bad Trans Feelings
Autostraddle.com online
2023-06-15
"Awkward-Rich’s book, which is a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards, builds upon the intertwined histories and politics of trans and disability studies to examine the stories we tell about transness and illness."
5 Black Male Poets Whose Words Enthrall Us
Ebony Magazine online
2023-04-27
Since his 2016 release “Sympathetic Little Monster,” won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award in 2018, young poet Cameron Awkward-Rich has been on the literary world’s radar. He is also a Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has penned a number of essays on gender and racial politics. Awkward-Rich continues to use his platform as an artist and educator to spread awareness of social justice and the unique experiences of transgender and Black individuals.
Poems of provocation
Boston Globe online
2020-06-10
“All of us write into and around issues of race, justice, etc.,” said Awkward-Rich, an assistant professor of gender studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “In the midst of all the unfolding of both hopeful and troubling chaos, it will be a place for people to feel the feelings that all of that has brought up.”
Select Publications (3)
The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment
Book – Duke University PressCameron Awkward-Rich
2022-11-04
In The Terrible We, Cameron Awkward-Rich thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. By tracing the coproduction of the categories of disabled and transgender in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzing transmasculine literature and theory by Eli Clare, Elliott DeLine, Dylan Scholinski, and others,
Dispatch
Persea BooksCameron Awkward-Rich
2019-12-10
In his second collection, Cameron Awkward-Rich reckons with American violence, while endeavoring to live and love in its shadow. Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of racial and gendered violence in the United States today an in its past.
Sympathetic Little Monster
Ricochet EditionsCameron Awkward-Rich
2016-05-01
Through a combination of lyric, narrative, & fractured essay, SYMPATHETIC LITTLE MONSTER attempts to make a space & a shape for the little girl who haunts our cultural/ personal narratives about blackness & transmasculinity.
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