Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Ai

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.

Notes:

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, on April 12, 1941. She earned her BA in special education from Wayne State University and her MA in English literature from New York University. Derricotte’s books of poetry include I: New & Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry; The Undertaker’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); and Tender (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). She is also the author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W. W. Norton, 1997), which won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction.

Together with Cornelius Eady, Derricotte cofounded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996, a national poetry organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.

For more about Derricotte (and her poems) go here and here.

Watch Toi Derricotte give a reading here (2015; ~30 min)

Watch Toi Derricotte talk about reading and writing long poems here.

Read excerpts in Kenyon Review from Derricotte's Black Notebooks here.

Read this Bettina Judd essay on Derricotte (from Poetry Northwest).

Poems we read include:

"Not Forgotten"

"In Knowledge of Young Boys"

"Touching/Not Touching: My Mother"

"The Undertaker's Daughter"