Rickey Laurentiis

Rickey Laurentiis was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to be reacquainted with the light. Boy with Thorn, their debut book, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her other honors include fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh as the Inaugural Fellow. Their poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry & other journals. In 2022, Laurentiis was named a Living Legends Honoree by the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, an organization which celebrates black trans lives. Her second book, Death of the First Idea, published this year by Knopf, was longlisted for the National Book Award.