WATCHNIGHT
WATCHNIGHT
2023 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD WINNER
“In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnight—a churchy holiday of messianic tarrying—and steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacement—from countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.”
SLINGSHOT
SLINGSHOT
2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 CLMP FIRECRACKER AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 QUEER|ARTS|PRIZE FOR RECENT WORK
“SLINGSHOT begins with the author ensconced in the menacing isolation of the pastoral, but once the work migrates to the City, monstrum grows form and fangs. In these messy, horny, desperate poems spun from dream logic, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of black sexual and gender deviance, as well as the emotional burden of being forced to the rim of society, then punished for what keeps you alive.”