Toi Derricotte is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and four earlier collections of poetry, including Tender, winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton), received the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her honors include, among many others, the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, two Pushcart Prizes and the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists. Derricotte is the co-founder of Cave Canem Foundation (with Cornelius Eady), Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Poetry
Spring 1994
Three Poems Written on the Back Flap of a Book by Moshe Dor
I empty the house of red shoes, gray shoes, of turquoise shoes with little heels, green shoes, yellow. In the night there is a black bridge. Those who can see […]
Poetry
Spring 1994
Tender
The tenderest meat comes from the houses where you hear the least squealing. The secret is to give a little wine before killing.
Poetry
Spring 1994
Quandary
The black poet who paystribute to Aimé Césaire sits with a white woman, sleeps with a white woman–but where does he take off his clothes?
Poetry
Spring 1994
Clitoris
This time with your mouth on my clitoris, I will not think he does not like the taste of me. I lift the purplish hood back from the pale white […]
Poetry
Spring 1994
Passing
A professor invited me to his college class. They were reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black students said, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks think they can fool other blacks, but I […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1993
The Tension between Memory and Forgetting in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa
Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. 58 pages. $10.95, paper. I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head by Yusef Komunyakaa. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1991
From the Black Notebooks
INTRODUCTION The following selection of autobiographical prose is taken from The Black Notebooks, which I began writing in 1974 when we became one of the first black families to move […]