Celebrating Ed Roberson: A Poetry Reading with Rosamond S. King, Dante Micheaux, Evie Shockley, and Ed Roberson

Writer, performer, and artist Rosamond S. King‘s most recent collection All the Rage was nominated for Lambda Literary and Big Other poetry awards. King is also the author of the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone and Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, winner of the Caribbean Studies Association best book award. King draws on reality to create non-literal, culturally and politically engaged interpretations of African diaspora experiences. Her performances have been curated into venues around the world. The goal of all of her work is to make people feel, wonder, and think, not necessarily in that order. King is the Carol L. Zicklin Honors Academy Chair at Brooklyn College (CUNY); President of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa; Founding Board Member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum, and a proud union member.

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus (Indolent Books, 2018), which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010). His poems and translations have appeared widely. Micheaux’s most recent work is the libretto for Rolf Hind’s opera Sky In a Small Cage. Micheaux’s other honors include the Oscar Wilde Award, an Amy Clampitt Residency, the Ambit Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, The New York Times Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. Micheaux is the 2026 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University and recently joined the faculty at Stonecoast.

Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023).  Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.

Ed Roberson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including MPH and Other Road Poems (Verge Books, 2021) and Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His newest book, Red Silk Woven Carpet, The President’s Wife, and the Generals of Autumn, is forthcoming from selva oscura press. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Roberson spent many years as a special programs administrator at Rutgers University. A Chicagoan since 2004, he has taught at Columbia College, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University. Roberson has also held posts at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Cave Canem retreat for Black Writers. Since 2023 he has served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Roberson’s varied career has also seen him working in Pittsburgh steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, and as a research assistant in limnology, studying inland and coastal freshwater systems. His extensive travels have taken him to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes, Mexico, Bermuda, and West Africa. He has been across the United States on a BMW motorcycle. Roberson’s many honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.