Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Cortney Lamar Charleston to discuss his new collection, It’s Important I Remember. Cortney is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal.
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Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), named a best book of 2021 by the New York Public Library and The Boston Globe; and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2026). He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Granta and many other publications. Charleston currently serves on the Haymarket Books Poetry Advisory Board.
About the Book
An incantation of strength and solace for persisting in twenty-first-century America
“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” In his sweeping third collection, Charleston brings a poet’s ear for echo and rhythm to bear on American history and life after 2016. For Charleston, these rhymes cut two ways: the long tradition of American racism and fascism, and the steady pulse of Black persistence. The collection’s titular invocation frames each poem, at times an oratory to rally a crowd, in other moments a private prayer whispered as the speaker gathers himself to face another day. Charleston insists that should we cede memory of our national biography—whether to repression or indifference—we will witness the country’s dissolution into something unrecognizable to many, yet all too familiar to its most marginalized people. But with each reiteration and riff, he also invokes a tenuous hope—that if we summon an American history of Black resistance, we might still make a more perfect union.
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