Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, and holds a BA from Wayne State University and an MA in English literature from New York University. With Cornelius Eady she co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. Tender (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize, and her literary memoir The Black Notebooks (W. W. Norton, 1997) won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction. I: New & Selected Poems (Pittsburgh, 2019) was a National Book Award finalist. She received the Frost Medal in 2020 and the Wallace Stevens Award in 2021.
