Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, he was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Granta, and elsewhere.
Poetry
Winter 2025
The Inventor of Whiteness
The Kenyon Review · “The Inventor of Whiteness” by Cortney Lamar Charleston was a Jackson hardware storekeeper’s son, the second born,after an older namesake and before the only delicate daughter,a […]
Poetry
Winter 2025
Before Exodus
The Kenyon Review · “Before Exodus” by Cortney Lamar Charleston A red stretch of road through thick woodsakin to a vein trailing down the forearmwhere everybody alongside is blood relationor […]
Mar/Apr 2020
Etymology of Gangsta
Read a micro-conversation with the author here. And here the original one saying hello to my little friend is my own hand, oh so carefully cradling my equipment like an […]
Cortney Lamar Charleston
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet and the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the […]