9781961209817.jpg
9781961209817.jpg

Proof: Inaugural Poem Suite

$14.95

by Cornelius Eady

With a Foreward by Tyehimba Jess

Cornelius Eady turns the inaugural poem into an instrument of reckoning.

First delivered to mark the historic inauguration of New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 1, 2026, the title poem is not ceremony—it is a summons. “You have to imagine it,” Eady insists, and from that insistence rises a chorus: those called too dark, too queer, too poor, too loud; those renamed invisible; those told “not now.” What if joy could wear down the rock of no? What if imagination were not escape, but evidence?

Moving from Robert Frost squinting into winter glare, to Elizabeth Alexander straightening her back before history, to Aretha Franklin beneath her church-crown hat, Eady braids civic pageantry with private memory. He summons the Colored Conventions of 1830, the 911 call that ricocheted through racial panic, the mock rifles on a Brooklyn rooftop, the “knife in sheep’s clothes.” Each poem widens the frame. Each poem refuses to look away.

by Cornelius Eady

With a Foreward by Tyehimba Jess

Cornelius Eady turns the inaugural poem into an instrument of reckoning.

First delivered to mark the historic inauguration of New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 1, 2026, the title poem is not ceremony—it is a summons. “You have to imagine it,” Eady insists, and from that insistence rises a chorus: those called too dark, too queer, too poor, too loud; those renamed invisible; those told “not now.” What if joy could wear down the rock of no? What if imagination were not escape, but evidence?

Moving from Robert Frost squinting into winter glare, to Elizabeth Alexander straightening her back before history, to Aretha Franklin beneath her church-crown hat, Eady braids civic pageantry with private memory. He summons the Colored Conventions of 1830, the 911 call that ricocheted through racial panic, the mock rifles on a Brooklyn rooftop, the “knife in sheep’s clothes.” Each poem widens the frame. Each poem refuses to look away.

About the Author

Cornelius Eady is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008), a nominee for an NAACP Image Award; Brutal Imagination (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991); and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Press, 1986), selected for the Academy of American Poets’ 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize by Philip Booth, Louise Glück, and Charles Simic. He has received the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award (2025), which recognizes lifetime achievement in poetry; a Lifetime Achievement Award from Furious Flower in 2024; and numerous other honors and recognitions, including an NEA Fellowship in Literature; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy; and the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award.

In 1999, Eady’s Running Man, a music-theatre piece co-written with jazz musician Diedre Murray, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and awarded a 1999 Obie for best musical score and lead actor in a musical. A production of Brutal Imagination (with a score by Diedre Murray) won the 2002 Oppenheimer Award for the best first play by an American Playwright. As a songwriter, Eady’s pandemic folk song project Don’t Get Dead, recorded with his Trio, was released in 2021 by June Appal Recording. His work and songs have been featured on NPR, BBC Radio 4, and the PBS Newshour.

With fellow poet Toi Derricotte, in 1996, Eady co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, a nonprofit organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets; fostering community across the diaspora; and facilitating a nurturing space in which to learn, experiment, create, and present. The National Book Foundation awarded Cave Canem the 2016 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, and in 2026, the organization received a $350,000 humanities grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Before recently retiring from academia, Eady taught at several prestigious universities and colleges, most recently serving as Chair of Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Previous appointments include, among others, the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and professor of English and theatre at the University of Missouri–Columbia and director of the Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Currently, he is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Vice President of the board of directors of Poets House, where he served as Interim Director in 2021–22.