Toi Derricotte
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.
“Violence is central in our lives, a constant and unavoidable reality. Experience is not a linear construct moving from one point to another - childhood to maturity, "bad" to "good," beginning to end - but a wheel turning around a point that shifts between hope and despair. "At the still point of the turning world," the job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.”
“-----What is more punishedamong the angry than anger? among the unsatisfied than desire? among the hate-filledthan hate? among the frightened than fear?”
“The job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.”