Since 1996 CaveCanem has been the major intellectual and creative support system for hundreds ofblack poets writing in the US. Cave Canem poets have published with importantblack presses, such as Third World Press and Lotus Press, as well as within mainstreamvenues, secured Stegner fellowships, Whiting awards, and other notable recognitionin the field. The annual summer retreat and theregional workshops are taught by renowned poets who foster poetic inquiry withan exacting attention to form. Few organizations, if any, give black poets theopportunity to listen to Rita Dove discuss the formal aspects of a poem intothe wee hours of the morning or intimately watch Ntozake Shange perform from ForColored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf. Cave Canem poets are perhaps some of the mostbroadly trained poets writing and teaching today, with many well versed in theblack poetic tradition as well as British literature, Caribbean and Asianpoetic traditions, and the classics.

Often I havewondered what future generations of poets will say about this particular timeof black artistic production that co-exists in an environment in which writingprograms, academic or otherwise, are none too far. What I hope comes across, orwhat makes Cave Canem unique among most, is not simply the visible difference thatCave Canem poets have made to broaden the field of American poetry, but the senseof fellowship each poet has to his peers regardless of one’s poeticstyle—formal, experimental, spoken word, or other. Like those who formedwriting communities during the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement,Cave Canem exists because so many black poets are still unable to find sufficientartistic and intellectual support within and outside of academia. As HarryetteMullen writes, Cave Canem is a “productive space where black poets,individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relievedof any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.” Personally, Cave Canemhas bestowed upon me a sense of literary ownership that no writing programcould have instilled. The ability to write a poem, attend to craft, and theseriousness with which I approach the genre could not have come from anythingother than Cave Canem, given the nature of race relations in thiscountry—historically and today. This is the particular lens from which Iwrite, and of course there are other points of entry as varied and valid as thepoets and the poems presented in this issue of The Drunken Boat. Cave Canem, and the vision set forth by itsfounders, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, as well as Carolyn and SarahMicklem, has meant so much to so many—because of them our voices become themeter of a sonnet, fists in the air, the cadence of good ole’ soul, or as LaurenK. Alleyne writes, perhaps we are simply “[g]od’s graffiti, the text of usscrawled  / wild, twisted into thisrenegade, complex sentence” called life—Ashe.

Niki Herd has been published in forums such as Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta!, Fromthe Web: A Global Anthology of Women’sPolitical Poetry, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Autumnal: ACollection of Elegies on compact disc, Kalliope, PMS:poemmemoirstory, 10×10.8, Xcp:Streetnotes Biannual Electronic ExhibitionSpace, and Black Issues Book Review.She has served on the board of Kore Press, an independent feminist publisherand was nominated for a Pushcart Award. Currently a Cave Canem Fellow, she wasrecently a finalist for the 2007 Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writer Award from theAstraea Lesbian Foundation for Social Justice.