Cameron Awkward-Rich is currently a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He has represented the Bay Area at multiple national poetry slams and is on staff at Muzzle Magazine. He is the author of Transit (Button Poetry 2015). You can find Cam’s work in The Journal, The Seattle Review, The Bakery and elsewhere. You can find Cam on public transit somewhere.
Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Transit, runner-up for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, takes the reader on a constantly surprising journey through gender and identity in contemporary America. Awkward-Rich’s academic prowess shines throughout, as does his remarkable ability to condense an essay’s worth of thought and theory into a few poignant lines. A book to be read anywhere and everywhere: in a classroom, on the subway, under blankets on a cold winter night.
Button Poetry Prize 2014 – Runner-Up
Buy Now“Cameron Awkward-Rich’s wintry collection is full of broken surfaces. Fists surge in bodies, blades cleave skin, but most recurrent, a boy dives into black water. Think of an anti-Narcissus who longs to break the liquid mirror, both fractalizing and multiplying his image. Yet the poet winds tight Transit’s shifting reflections of puncture and fracture into poems of great tonal discipline and grimly mordant observation, pushing us deeper into memory into myth into girl into bird into mouth into sex onto cars onto trains into your hands, reader. Open the book and get opened by it.”
— Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
