Captivity

Toi Derricotte (born in Hamtramck, Michigan) is a poet and educator whose work explores race, the Black middle class, trauma, and the intimate textures of womanhood and family with lyric precision and unflinching candor. She received her BA from Wayne State University and her MFA from New York University. Her collections include Natural Birth (Crossing Press, 1983), Tender (Pittsburgh, 1997), and I (Pittsburgh, 2019), which won the PEN/Voelcker Award. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem, the influential workshop and retreat for African American poets, in 1996. She received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.