05/12/2026
🗣️ Join us & at 6pm on Thur. 5/28 in Pittsburgh (ahead of ) in celebration of Meredith Nnoka’s LES PORTES. Meredith () will be joined by Cameron Awkward-Rich ()—who selected LES PORTES as the Winner for the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize.
The event serves as our first CAAPP event held in the new CAAPP-Jazz Performance Theatre that we share with pitt_jazz studies (at the new Hill District CEC )
ADDRESS: 2007 Centre Avenue
(Entrance on Wylie Ave side)!
Meredith Nnoka (they/she) is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of Les Portes, winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, and the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman (O, Miami, 2023) and A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music (C&R Press, 2016). Nnoka holds a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, both in Africana studies. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of three collections of poetry:  Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), and An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025). Cameron’s creative work can be found in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation.
Cameron’s critical/scholarly writing can be found, among other places, in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, and American Quarterly. His book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022) was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in LGBTQ literature and cultural studies.
Presently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
