At the 2024 Reid Keynote, Students Learned the Power of Community

Keynote speaker Cornelius Easy and the 2024 Reid Writers of Color event. Photo Credit: Tony Olivas

By Yev Gelman

At the close of the Spring semester, on April 24th, members of the Fordham English community got the opportunity to attend the Reid Writers Of Color Reading Series keynote featuring poet and activist Cornelius Eady. Now in its sixteenth year, the Series is generously supported by the Reid Family, who has brought some of the world’s leading authors to Fordham. Eady is a clear example of this excellence. Since his first collection, Kartunes, was published in 1980, he has been a prolific writer — at seventy, he has published nine full-length collections and co-founded Cave Canem, a non-profit organization serving Black writers in America, which won the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award in 2016. The book featured by this year’s Reid Committee is Eady’s 2008 collection Hardheaded Weather, which combines new and selected older poems, giving readers a deep sense of Eady’s development as a poet and thinker across decades.

As the Creative Writing Program Assistant, it was my responsibility to assist Cornelius (who insisted I call him by his first name within minutes of our meeting) in finding the room where his craft class for the Creative Writing Concentrators was to be held. From the very beginning, I was struck by his vitality and friendliness — despite his formal attire, Cornelius carried himself with a grounded kind of grace, enabling us to chat all the way from the front of Lincoln Center’s Lowenstein building to the South Lounge.

Creative Writing concentrators prepare for the craft class with Cornelius Eady. Photo Credit: Tony Olivas

The craft class, much like the rest of the evening, flew by. For the 45 minutes allotted for the event, Cornelius had decided to focus on the art of revisions; he brought in three different versions of one of the poems from Hardheaded Weather and took the class through his process of getting from the first draft to the last. Though the subject was specific, Cornelius allowed students to ask questions and relate to the material generally, eventually spending time discussing the ways in which Blackness has impacted his work more broadly. Much of his work draws on deeply personal history and experiences and when I asked if he felt shame in writing publicly about the faults within his family, he answered: “Of course I was ashamed. But I am a writer. I had to write it.”

After the craft class, students had the opportunity to enjoy a light lunch while Cornelius signed the Creative Writing Concentrators’ copies of his book, and following the reception, we all made our way down to Pope Auditorium for the keynote address. Even fifteen minutes before the start of the reading, the room was already overflowing with students and faculty. Eady’s artistic excellence and literary acclaim attracted so many students that the seating needed to be extended to the sides of the room, as well as the stage.

A full house gathered to be a part of Eady’s talk. Photo Credit: Elijah Schneider

The talk, which Cornelius titled “Community,” began with a reading of his 1991 poem “Gratitude.” By this point in the evening, I had already understood Cornelius to be a brilliant writer and charismatic reader, but the experience of listening to him perform this poem out loud was truly something that I will remember for years to come. In each of its seven pages, the poem claims the stunning, unlikely success of a younger Eady’s work, celebrating both the struggle and joy of his life as a Black poet: “I’m 36 years old, / a black, American poet. / Nearly all the things / that weren’t supposed to occur / Have happened (anyway).”

Photo Credit: Elijah Schneider

The end of the poem left many of us — me included — weeping in our seats, but that was just the beginning. After he finished reading, Cornelius spent the rest of the talk discussing the power of community and companionship for artists, focusing in particular on Cave Canem and his work in bringing Black writers together. The power of community, for him, is one of seeing and being seen in a world that too often finds itself blind to the experiences of others. Drawing a sharp contrast between his (short-lived) time at an MFA program that clearly did not recognize his potential and the community he found within friends and collaborators at Cave Canem, Cornelius relayed his hard-learned lesson: that creative success is at its greatest alongside peers, and not in competition with them. 

Gelman and Eady in conversation. Photo Credit: Tony Olivas

After the talk, I joined Cornelius onstage for a short Q&A, with questions gathered from students across the English department — including some of my own! The conversation was fluid and fun; I found myself feeling like we were almost out of time just halfway through the session, because of how much ground we had covered — from his advice to his younger self (“Keep writing.”) to his reflection on the particular importance of community in the current political moment, Cornelius spoke warmly and confidently to the anxieties of our generation. When asked about his experience in the publishing industry, he told us about the preponderance of writers whose practice is centered on competition and profit, cautioning young writers against joining in the game of comparing advances and deals. It was clear that whereas many see careers (even creative ones) through finances and individual accomplishments, Cornelius sees every part of his life as founded in relationships and connections. From his wife, who he described as “the person he couldn’t do it without,” to his long-time publisher who agreed to change the trajectory of Hardheaded Weather from anthology to new collection within days of it being finalized, Cornelius never lets himself forget all the people who helped him through on his journey to literary success. “At the end of the day,” he said to us at the close of the event, “I get to get paid for doing the thing that I love. That’s how lucky I am.”

The joy of a real writing community, in evidence. Photo Credit: Tony Olivas

Yev Gelman (he/him) is a Russian-born/Chicago-raised writer and theatre artist currently working out of a small apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This May, he graduated from Fordham with a B.A. in Creative Writing and Theatre Directing, and in July, he began full-time work at the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. He enjoys walks of all varieties, the ocean, and the tomatoes that grow in his garden.