Cameron Awkward-Rich

Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and academic. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection Sympathetic Little Monster, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Dispatch, which won the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award. In addition, he has published the chapbook Transit.

Awkward-Rich earned a PhD from Stanford University's program in Modern Thought and Literature before spending time at Duke University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Transgender Studies & Humanities Project with the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. As of February 2026, he teaches women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Awkward-Rich was a keynote speaker for the 2020 Thinking Trans/Trans Thinking Conference, organized by the Trans Philosophy Project. He was also a Featured Poet during the 2020 Split This Rock Poetry Festival, a gathering in Washington, DC, organized biennially around social justice themes.

He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Publications

Books An Optimism. New York: Persea Books, 2025.

The Terrible We: Thinking With Trans Maladjustment. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022.

Dispatch: poems. New York: Persea Books, 2019.

Sympathetic Little Monster. Los Angeles: Richocet Editions, 2016.

Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation (with Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, Beyza Ozer, Kay Ulanday Barrett). Little Rock: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017.

Chapbooks Transit. Gardena: Button Poetry, 2017.

Craft Essays "Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive."

Interviews Gow, Robin. "Trying to Feel A Part of Some Kind of 'We': A Conversation With Cameron Awkward-Rich."

Marshell, Kyla. "The Pen Ten with Cameron Awkward-Rich."

Scholarly Articles