Cameron Awkward-Rich

Poet and writer Cameron Awkward-Rich is author of the full-length poetry collections Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), as well as the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). Awkward-Rich’s poetry and essays explore artists’ ability to reimagine the politics of social worlds; in an interview with THEthe, he maintains that “while I want to say that the most important thing for me in my work and the work of others is this political dimension—does this object help me to imagine other worlds?/give me respite from this one?/expose or rework its harms rather than perpetuate them?—I also think that everything I write and most things other people write fail at this in one way or another. Still, in the attempt to not fail, new possibilities open.”

A Cave Canem fellow, Awkward-Rich earned a PhD from Stanford University. He teaches women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is an editor at Muzzle Magazine and HEArt.