KRCB-FM: WordTemple

On today’s very special program, Hastings speaks with Cave Canem Fellow Cortney Lamar Charleston. His debut collection, Telepathologies, won the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by D.A. Powell. In 2017, Charleston was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Lamar began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project when he was an undergraduate studying economics and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His poetry is described as a marriage between art and activism, and a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. His academic background, coupled with his upbringing spent bouncing between Chicago’s South Side and its South and West suburbs influence his written work, grappling with race, masculinity, heteronormativity, class, family, faith and how identity is, functionally, a transition zone between all of these competing markers. Charleston’s poems