CameronBarnettis a poet and teacher living in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author ofMurmurandThe Drowning Boy's Guide to Water, the winner of the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Prize and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. Other honors include a 2019 Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Emerging Artist and serving as the '22-'24 Emerging Black Writer in Residence at Chatham University. Cameron teaches at his middle school alma mater, Falk Laboratory School. His work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America.
“Ceaselessly honest and uncannily self-aware, the poems in The
Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water dance between grace, music, and
truth. With a voice that’s leaning in instead of away, this
collection is a lively and necessary debut that cracks open the
complications of skin color, love, and the natural
world.” —Ada Limón, 24th US Poet Laureate "Complexity and
surprise arrive with each page turn of Cameron Barnett's debut
collection, The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water. Barnett's poems push
past the "likes" of these digital days toward the deeply difficult
work of self-reflection and discomfort. There is no one way to be
Black in the United States and these poems affirm that reality.
They are an answer to both Black-checking and America's tired
legacy of racism. These poems know to be Black is a beautiful and
varied state of being. 'I was told it was a bad thing,' they admit,
and then turn that lie on its head." —Yona Harvey, author of
Hemming the Water
"'Maybe if my blood were blue I’d have three hearts like you,'
Cameron Barnett writes in one of the many imaginative poems of The
Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water. Maybe Barnett’s blood isn’t blue,
but it’s fueled by the clarity and candor of the blues. Moreover,
his poems pulse with the generosity of a three-hearted sensibility:
‘one for forgiving, one for forgetting, one for moving on.’ These
poems weave the personal and public histories rooted in our
natures―our gardens, our spirits, our bodies. Compassionate,
shrewd, and mature: this is a marvelous debut." —Terrance
Hayes, author of How to Be Drawn". . . The Drowning Boy’s
Guide to Water is a full meal, and not always easy to digest.
[Barnett's] craft is superb, pure excellence in both expression and
thrust, but the themes are exhausting, necessary...[his] endurance
analyzing America’s binary black and white world is honorable,
essential, and true, yet leaves the reader bone-tired." —New
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