Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter and four previous poetry collections, including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is a co-founder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. “I”: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press), a finalist for a National Book Award in Poetry, shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five of Derricotte’s previously published books of poetry.
