Poetry Reading: Dustin Pearson with Curtis Derrick

Dustin Pearson is the author of Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018) and A Family is a House (C&R Press, 2019). He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a director of the Clemson Literary Festival. He won the Academy of American Poets Katharine C. Turner Prize and holds an MFA from Arizona State University. His work appears in Blackbird, Vinyl Poetry, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Read our interview with the poet.

Retired after 43 years of teaching, with tours on all the tiers of academe, Curtis Derrick lives quietly in Columbia. Born in Puerto Rico and raised across the South, he took up writing as a boy for his own amusement and to impress his elders. A winner of fellowships from the SC Academy of Authors and SC Arts Commission, his poetry has appeared in magazines, journals and two anthologies, TWENTY and The Southern Poetry Anthology.