Cameron Awkward-Rich in Person

Join us on Thursday, October 9 at 7 PM as Cameron Awkward-Rich presents his new collection of poems, An Optimism.

Here is collection of poems about finding oneself in a life—an ordinary life that one could not have imagined—and making the decision to live it. Against our terribly ambivalent present—in which Black, trans, and other minoritized forms of life seem at once more possible than ever and, also, relentlessly under attack—An Optimism gives us poems in search of ways to survive—and even thrive. Anchored by an epistolary sequence directed to the 20th century poet and activist Pauli Murray, and looking to the work of other trans, queer, and black feminist writers like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and June Jordan for company and counsel, Cameron Awkward-Rich situate us in spaces intimate and capacious, from lovers’ beds to the Gamma Quadrant across the Milky Way. Although it speaks resolutely and intimately from a particular "I", An Optimism turns to the creativity of the motley we to, in Hortense Spillers’ words, make “a space for living.” These are poems for the living, infused with hope and ancestral wisdom.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025), as well as The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). His writing has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and the ACLS. Presently, he is an Associate Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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