Cornelius Eady

Great Writers

Cornelius Eady

Poet, playwright and musician Cornelius Eady tells the truth about the world through poetry, says New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who asked Eady to write and read a poem for his inauguration. Eady's recent poetry also includes a tribute to Renee Nicole Good.

[Photo credit: Chip Cooper, courtesy of Blue Flower Arts, Poetry Foundation]

Eady, born in 1954, in Rochester, NY, has won many awards for his collections of poetry, including a recent lifetime achievement award from the Academy of American Poets. The Wallace Stevens Award, which he received in October 2025, carries a stipend of $100,000. Eady is the cofounder of Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization supporting emerging Black poets.

In a New York Times story (Jeffery C. Mays, Dec. 30, 2025), Mamdani describes Eady as someone who doesn’t just write beautiful poems, but also has the “rare gift” of telling the truth about the world.

“As we work to build a New York where every voice is heard,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement, “it is a privilege to usher in this moment with a poet who has dedicated his career to that very work.”

In the citation for the 2025 Wallace Stevens Award, Afaa Michael Weaver, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, writes of Eady: “His poetry explores the unions of states, states of remembrance and celebration, fear and courage. ... Eady’s work inhabits that intersection of poetry and song as a poet and songwriter, reading his soul in relationship to the aggregate humanity he recognizes and defends, even as he takes to his right of citizenship, which is to question the questionable, whether it is theft or the taking of lives."

Proof

By Cornelius Eady

Written for the inauguration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Jan. 1, 2026

 
You have to imagine it:
 
 
Who said you were too dark/too
 
Large? Too queer/too loud?
 
 
Who said you were too poor/
 
Too strange? Too fat?
 
 
You have to imagine it:
 
 
Who said you must keep quiet?
 
Who heard your story, then
 
Rolled their eyes?
 
 
Who tried to change your name
 
To invisible?
 
 
You’ve got to imagine:
 
 
Who heard your name
 
And refused to pronounce it?
 
Who checked their watch
 
And said “not now”?
 
 
James Baldwin wrote:
 
 
“The place in which I’ll fit
 
Will not exist
 
Until I make it.”
 
 
New York, city of invention,
 
Roiling town, refresher
 
And re-newer,
 
 
New York, city of the real,
 
Where the canyons
 
Whisper in a hundred
 
Tongues,
 
 
New York, 
 
Where your lucky self
 
Waits for your
 
Arrival,
 
 
Where there is always soil
 
For your root.
 
 
This is our time.
 
 
The taste of us/the spice of us
 
The hollers and the rhythms and
 
The beats of us.
 
 
In the echo of our
 
Ancestors,
 
Who made certain we know
 
Who we are.
 
 
City of Insistence,
 
City of Resistance,
 
 
You have to imagine:
 
 
An Army that wins without
 
Firing a bullet,
 
 
A joy that wears down
 
The rock of no.
 
 
Up from insults,
 
Up from blocked doors,
 
Up from trick bags,
 
Up from fear/up from shame,
 
Up from the way it was done before.
 
You have to imagine:
 
 
That space they said wasn’t yours.
 
That time they said you’d never own.
 
The invisible city lit, on its way.
 
This moment is our proof.
 
 

Renee Nicole Good Is Murdered

By Cornelius Eady

Up rides the super cops,
The cancellation squad.
A dormant virus, melted from
The ice pack,

And the conversation
Is end-stopped when
The shell cracks her
Car window, does its
Dumb duty,
Brings silence
To a poet’s mind.

The President says:
You’re a terror bot
If you don’t comply.
Homeland security
Puts on a ten gallon
Texas size hat,
Says see what fucking
With the bull gets you.

There is a picture of her
Just before it tips rancid,
Just before she’s dragged
Into how they see her.

I wish I could read the words
As they blaze their last, unsuspected
Race through her skull.
A language poem that ends on
The word
Impossible.

[Source: Academy of American Poets]

Find out more about Cornelius Eady:

The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/cornelius-eady

The Academy of American Poets: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets-announces-2025-winners-wallace-stevens-award-lifetime-achievement-and

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