Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady (born 1954) is an American writer focusing largely on matters of race and society. His poetry, often praised for its simplicity and plainspokenness, centers on jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class. He is a co-founder of the Cave Canem fellowship for poets of the African diaspora.

Biography Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, New York, and is an author of seven volumes of poetry. In most of Eady's poems, there is a musical quality drawn from the blues and jazz.

Honors awarded to Eady include the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and individual Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2001, his poetry collection Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Eady collaborated with jazz composer Diedre Murray in the production of several musical theater pieces, including You Don't Miss Your Water (1997), Running Man (1999), Fangs, and Brutal Imagination. Running Man was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999.

Eady has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, The Writer's Voice, The College of William and Mary, University of Notre Dame, and Sweet Briar College. He was an associate professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at State University of New York at Stony Brook and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the City College of New York, as well as the Miller Chair in Poetry at University of Missouri. , he serves as a professor of English and holds one of the Tennessee Chairs of Excellence at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is married to novelist Sarah Micklem.

After voting for Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 New York City mayoral election, Eady was selected to perform an inaugural poem at the mayor-elect's inauguration on January 1, 2026. The poem was excerpted in The New York Times on December 30, 2025. "Proof" 2025 Written for Zohran Mamdani's inauguration as mayor of New York. Excerpted in The New York Times, December 30, 2025.