Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016) selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Norma Faber First Book Award. Tenderness was a finalist for a Golden Poppy Award, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and a Northern California Book Award. A Cave Canem fellow, Austin served as the 2016-2017 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. He was a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He was a 2022-2023 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar. He has had poems and essays commissioned by The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, Craft Contemporary, The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, LAXART, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. He is currently at work on a hybrid non-fiction book on ekphrasis. He lives in Chicago, IL.