My Name and Other Languages I'm Learning How to Speak

My Name and Other Languages I'm Learning How to Speak by Marissa Davis is the winner of the fifth annual Toi Derricotte + Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.

Created through a partnership between Cave Canem, The Writer's Room at the Betsy Hotel, and O, Miami Poetry Festival, the prize honors one chapbook manuscript a year by a black poet, regardless of the poet's publication history or career status. The manuscript was selected by Danez Smith. 

“The embodied poetics found in My Name & Other Langauges I Am Learning How To Speak exist brightly in the canon of Black femme poets and points to unfathomably bright future for the canon. Davis is “prepared to swallow flame” and anyone picking up this chapbook should be prepared to do the same.” — Danez Smith, 2019

Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her original poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Duende, Verse of April, Rattle, The Iowa Review, and Sundog Lit; her translations are forthcoming in Ezra and Mid-American Review. She graduated with a BA from Vanderbilt University and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at New York University as a Rona Jaffe fellow. Marissa is a poetry editor on the Nashville Review’s team, as well as an assistant translations editor for Washington Square Review. 

Publication of this chapbook was made possible through support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Miami-Dade County, and Schmidt Family Foundation.

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