Introduction to Poet Cortney Lamar Charleston

As an introduction to the remarkable poet Cortney Lamar Charleston, I have embedded below How Do You Raise a Black Child?, the deeply moving first release from Motionpoems' seventh season of poetry films produced in cooperation with Cave Canem. Charleston's poem first appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal. Seyi Peter-Thomas (Station Film) directed the film.

Charleston is the author of the forthcoming collection Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, March 2017), which includes the poem on which the film is based; the collection was selected by D.A. Powell. A finalist for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize (2015) and a semi-finalist for Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize (2016), Charleston also has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net poems. Charleston has published poems in such prestigious periodicals as Atticus Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Pleiades, and Rattle. 

Text of "How Do You Raise a Black Child?"

"Cortney Lamar Charleston Interview with Julie Brooks Barbour", Connotation Press, Issue II, Vol. VIII, November 2016

Corney Lamar Charleston, "How a Poem Arrives", Bird's Thumb, July 12, 2016

"The Conversation: Cortney Lamar Charleston and Danez Smith", The Rumpus, March 26, 2016

Selected Cortney Lamar Charleston Poems Online: "Spell Check Question the Validity of Black Life" at Winter Tangerine, "Feeling Fucked Up" at Rattle, "I'm Not a Racist" at One Throne, "State of the Union" at Apogee, "Still Life with Skateboarding Rapper Orbited by Nerd Paraphernalia" at Storyscape, "Meditation on Wings and Meeting Gabriel in a Philadelphia Prison" at Thrush, "Melanophobia: Fear of Black" at The Missouri Review, "I'm Pretty Sure It's Not Called a 'Race Card' Anymore" at Drunk in a Midnight Choir, "Eavesdropping on White Noise", "A Letter of Complaint from Uniontown, Ohio", "Someday I'll Love America", and "Do Not Walk Through the Neighborhood of My Body", All at Atticus Review, "A Brief History of Violence" at TriQuarterly (Audio Available), "A Boogie Night, Age 12" at Up the Staircase Quarterly, and "Infoxicated Corner: 2016 Spotlight Series: Poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston" at The The

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