Lit 50 2023: Poetry

For this year’s list, we organize everything by category.

Lit 50 2023: Who Really Books In Chicago introduction
Lit 50 2023: Nonfiction
Lit 50 2023: Comics & Kids Books
Lit 50 2023: Translation
Lit 50 2023: Fiction

CM Burroughs/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

CM Burroughs
CM Burroughs is the author of “The Vital System” and “Master Suffering,” and an associate professor of poetry at Columbia College. She has received commissions from the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum to create poetry in response to art installations. Burroughs is currently expanding a piece called “Dear Margaret: A Epistolary Collaboration.” “Every tiny poem is the DNA of an experience,” Burroughs says. “A moment of living in this particular time with our various joys and pains. Our culture suggests we should tamp down our impulses ‘to feel’ in praise of stoicism or self-regulation, but I want to expand empathy with my work.” (Billy Lombardo)

Carlos Cumpián/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Carlos Cumpián
Carlos Cumpián is the cofounder of March/Abrazo Press, the first Chicana, Native American and Latino poetry small press in Illinois and the author of five books of poetry, including his most recent work, “Human Cicada.” Of “Human Cicada,” writer and activist Luis Rodriguez, has said, “It’s the tempo and tension of igniting words, breathing magic into the living roots and branches of Chicago and Chicano poetry.” In addition to working on his poetic memoir, “Accidental Rebel:1968-1976,” Cumpián is currently launching “Coyote’s Song: The Collected Poems & Selected Art of Carlos Cortez Koyokuikatl,” and editing two books by Chicano poets writing about growing up on 18th Street in Pilsen. “I’m amazed by their generational perspectives and concerns,” he says. “The similarities and differences.” (Billy Lombardo)

Aricka Foreman/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Aricka Foreman
A poet and interdisciplinary writer, Aricka Foreman is the author of “Dream with a Glass Chamber” and “Salt Body Shimmer” and the winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Foreman is a publicist for Haymarket Books. Of her work, Foreman says, “In many ways, I’m trying to understand. I don’t understand this world. I know the intellectualizing of it, and the ways we justify the many cruelties and sit juxtaposed amongst the many joys and pleasures. But I can’t move through this world without questions that get to the marrow of possibility.” (Billy Lombardo)

Rebecca Morgan Frank/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Rebecca Morgan Frank
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of the poetry collections “Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country,” “The Spokes of Venus,” “Little Murders Everywhere” and most recently, “Oh You Robot Saints!,” a New York Public Library Best Books of 2021 selection. Frank is co-founder of the online magazine, Memorious. She’s currently working on “Hostile Architecture,” a new collection of poems. “I’m interested in what drives other makers and thinkers,” Frank says. “From roboticists and architects and composers to historians and my fellow poets—as we all try to make sense of the world.” (Billy Lombardo)

Krista Franklin/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo.

Krista Franklin
Krista Franklin is a writer, performer, visual artist and the author of four books, including “Too Much Midnight,” “Under the Knife,” “Study of Love & Black Body,” and “Solo(s).” Krista’s visual art has been exhibited in many places, including on the set of the Fox series “Empire.” This summer, Franklin will install her first public art in the T5 International Corridor at O’Hare Airport. “Writing is a pathway toward a deeper understanding of oneself,” Franklin says. “An opportunity to articulate the things that mean the most to oneself, to take a position, make a stand. It’s an opportunity to illuminate how gorgeously complex it is to be a human in a world that becomes increasingly insistent on us becoming as inhumane as possible.” (Billy Lombardo)

J. Ivy
The title of J. Ivy’s “The Poet Who Sat by the Door,” which won the 2023 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Poetry album, is a nod to both his South Side and literary roots. Over the course of a three-decade career, the pioneering hip-hop poet has infiltrated mainstream music and television with five award-winning albums and two books. Ivy used his popular poem “Dear Father” as a basis for his 2015 book “Dear Father: Breaking the Cycle of Pain.” He’s collaborated with a wide range of respected artists, and counts a Clio and Peabody among his many awards. Chicago’s inaugural poet laureate, avery r. young, writes, “J. Ivy is an important member of the spoken-word/poetry community, not only in Chicago, but nationwide. Fuck it, the world. His pure advocacy to have spoken-word poetry honored by the Recording Academy makes him Poet President!” (Donald G. Evans)

Maya Marshall
Maya Marshall is the author of “All the Blood Involved in Love” and “Secondhand,” and the co-founder of underbelly, a journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. She’s an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Adelphi University. Maya’s writing focuses on the essential questions of life and death, of women, motherhood and desire. Marshall is working on essays on aging, grief, healing, beauty, marriage, and the American road trip. “I want to make clear and beautiful things,” she says. “I want to connect to other people. To tell the truth. Protect the truth, and call the bullshit. As Toni Cade Bambara said, ‘Do not leave the arena to the fools.’“ (Billy Lombardo)

Adrian Matejka/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka has been the editor of Poetry magazine since 2022, bringing new voices to the 111-year-old publication. He also just released a graphic novel, “Last On His Feet,” about boxer Jack Johnson, with artwork by Youseff Daoudi. Former poet laureate of Indiana, Matejka has published several collections of poetry, including “Somebody Else Sold the World,” “Map to the Stars,” “The Big Smoke” (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), “Mixology” (selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series), and “The Devil’s Garden.” Matejka says there’s an “openness” to the Poetry editorial room, which allows in unique styles and points of view. “We’re making the pages available to whomever writes the finest poetry, and the finest gets redefined every day,” he told Newcity in a 2022 interview. (Mary Wisniewski)

H. Melt
Nonbinary writer, poet and editor H. Melt is working on a children’s book about trans ancestors, elders and icons—“a history book for young people that really shares different people through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their stories and how they have fought for liberation in overlapping and interconnected ways.” Of the effects of book bans and anti-trans legislation in southern states, Melt says bans are nothing new, and it’s important for LGBTQ+ people to keep writing, sharing their stories, and getting them into the hands of young people. Melt is concerned about trans youth—their mental health, their ability to access health care and find community, and their ability to “see that a future is really possible, and not just one that’s filled with difficulty and struggle, but imagine a future for themselves where they can realize their dreams like any other kid.” (Mary Wisniewski)

Faisal Mohyuddin/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Faisal Mohyuddin
Faisal Mohyuddin’s upcoming poetry chapbook, “An End to Captivity,” focuses on losing his father, his struggle to not write about grief, and becoming a father himself. Mohyuddin’s father died in 2015, four months after his own son was born. “It’s about the losing, and about the learning,” Mohyuddin says. Mohyuddin is also the author of the poetry collection “The Displaced Children of Displaced Children,” winner of the Sexton Prize. Mohyuddin teaches English at Highland Park High School, is an adjunct instructor in creative writing at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University, and is a visual artist. Fortunately for the future of the craft, Mohyuddin says most of his high school students love poetry. “It’s creative and it’s really personal, and students really gravitate to that,” he says. (Mary Wisniewski)

C. Russell Price/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

C. Russell Price
C. Russell Price’s sex- and music-filled poetry, though often funny, traverses a range of weighty subjects. They relocated from the Appalachians to Chicago to pursue a poetry MFA from Northwestern University. They said there are more people on their Rogers Park block than there were in their entire hometown of Glade Spring, Virginia. “Everyone looks after each other in the South, but it’s all based on white cis hetero,” they say. “In Chicago, you get to be celebrated rather than downtrodden because of your uniqueness.” Price serves on the StoryStudio faculty, the Ragdale Foundation editorial board, and as an editor of The Anarchist Review of Books. A revered chapbook preceded last year’s full-length poetry collection “oh, you thought this was a date?!: APOCALYPSE POEMS,” which explores sexual assault survivorship and queer liberation. Their work-in-progress features a cowboy, a blue horse, and the poet. (Donald G. Evans)

Srikanth Reddy/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Srikanth Reddy
Srikanth Reddy is the author of three poetry collections: “Voyager,” “Facts for Visitors,” and “Underworld Lit.” He teaches at the University of Chicago and is the poetry editor of The Paris Review. “I try to keep my neighborhood, my nation, and my planet all in view at the same time,” Reddy says. “Sometimes I’m not sure which planet is mine, though. The peculiar eccentricities of a writer’s sense of unbelonging in the world are what make their work, oddly enough, universal and urgent. And funny. And sad.” Reddy is working on a book of lectures on poetry, titled “The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry with Pictures.” (Billy Lombardo)

Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir.” She served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is also the author of “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” and five collections of poetry: “Monument: Poems New & Selected,” “Thrall,” “Native Guard,” for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” and “Domestic Work.” Trethewey is a professor of English in the Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “For as long as I can remember, my father had been telling me that one day I would have to become a writer, that because of the nature of my experience I would have something necessary to say.” (Billy Lombardo)

Keith S. Wilson/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Keith S. Wilson
Early readers of Keith S. Wilson’s poetry collection, “Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love,” might not recognize the book Copper Canyon published in 2019. Wilson continuously revamped the manuscript to reflect current obsessions, like family, mythology, race and romantic love. The compact, lyrically intense book became a bit of all those things. “I don’t think there’s a wrong way of being open,” he says. Wilson’s next collection will contain more “visual poetry,” by which he means, literally, graphs and diagrams and the like. Wilson, a game designer by day, means to apply his math and science training to this bold, innovative approach. Wilson spent much of his teen years living in Northern Kentucky, then fell in love with Chicago on an AWP road trip. He moved to Hyde Park for graduate school at Chicago State in 2011 and has stayed. The Affrilachian poet’s work has earned him many fellowships, grants and residencies. (Donald G. Evans)

avery r. young/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

FEATURED POETRY

avery r. young
avery is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, a Leader for a New Chicago 2022 awardee, a Cave Canem fellow and a co-director of The Floating Museum. His poetry and prose have been featured in “BreakBeat Poets,” “Teaching Black,” Poetry magazine, and alongside images in photographer Cecil McDonald Jr’s “In the Company of Black.” young is the composer and librettist for a newly commissioned work from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, “Safronia,” and his full-length recording, “Tubman,” is the soundtrack to his collection of poetry, “Neckbone: Visual Verses.”

To experience avery r. young on stage is to wish you hired four professional videographers to record everything in the room and let you just take in as much as you can from the soulful performance, so you could just take in avery, from his extraordinary agility—one that tries and fails to follow him, capture every split-second shift in direction, one that pans the audience, one that’s on you, and one that’s on the crowd outside wondering what the hell’s going on in that room. And maybe a GoPro on avery’s head, too, so you can imagine just a little bit of what the world looks like for avery when he’s onstage—an occasion that occurs much more often since he was named the Chicago’s Inaugural Poet Laureate on April 24.

Of his art, he says “My work is a soul sermon that has several points of entry: the eyes, the ears, the heart, and the imagination.”

“Several things draw me to create,” avery says. “A story or an incident. An injustice or a random slice of joy. I write a lot of my experience as a Black cis-male in America, because I am constantly being reminded that I am such on a daily basis. Something or somebody has decided there is no value in all that I enter every room with. My work is constantly advocating for me and all of my modifiers, if not building a world where they have room to coexist.”

“There’s a lot coming down the pike,” avery says. “Some of it, I am going to step out of its way, and other stuff I’ll welcome with open arms. And whatever that is, best believe it will be a thing that has a life that turns the corner before it do.” (Billy Lombardo)

POETRY
The Hall of Fame

Tara Betts

Eve L. Ewing

Reginald Gibbons

Angela Jackson

Haki R. Madhubuti

Simone Muench

Ruben Quesada

Ed Roberson

Erika Sánchez

Jamila Woods