Etymology of Gangsta

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.