Poetry by the Sea is thrilled to welcome Cornelius Eady as the Keynote speaker for our 2026 Conference. The conference will run from Tuesday May 19 to Friday May 22, 2026, and the Keynote reading will take place on Wednesday, May 20 following the banquet. Books will be available for sale before and after the Keynote, and you are also welcome to bring books you already own for a brief signing after the event. Please see link for registration information.
Cornelius Eady is the author of several books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and his most recent collection The War Against the Obvious. With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. He is the recipient of The Academy of American Poet’s 2025 Wallace Stevens Award, an NEA Fellowship in Literature, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. Eady has been a teacher for over twenty years, and is currently the Chair of Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.