Toi Derricotte: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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'''Toi Derricotte''' (pronounced '''{{sc|dær}}'''-ɪ-kɒt) (born April 12, 1941 in [[Hamtramck, Michigan]]) is an [[United States|American]] [[poet]] and a professor of writing at [[University of Pittsburgh]].

*She won the 2012 [[PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry]].▼

At [[Wayne State University]] she earned a [[Bachelor of Arts|B.A.]] in 1965 and an [[Master of Arts (postgraduate)|M.A.]] in 1984 at [[New York University]] in English literature.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.poets.org |title=Toi Derricotte |accessdate=2007-12-12}}</ref>

With [[Cornelius Eady]], she co-founded [[Cave Canem Foundation]], a summer workshop for African-American poets.

==Biography==

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Her first attempt at sharing her poems with others came when, at fifteen, she visited a cousin, a medical school student who was then taking an embryology class. Encouraged by a trip they took to the Chicago Museum to see fetuses and embryos at various stages of development, Derricotte, who was careful not to show her poems to her parents who never "even alluded to babies before birth ... [or] talked to [her] about sex," anxiously showed them to this cousin who pronounced them "sick, morbid." Faced with this unexpected rebuff, Derricotte remembers being faced with several choices: "I could have said something is wrong with me and stopped writing, or I could have continued to write, but written about the things I knew would be acceptable, or I could go back underground." For Derricotte, the choice was obvious: rather than risk ostracism for openly writing about the forbidden, she opted "to go back underground."

In 1959, Derricotte graduated from Girls Catholic Central and enrolled that autumn in Wayne State University as a special education major.
In 1962, her junior year at Wayne State, she gave birth to a son in a [[home for unwed mothers]].
This act of rebellion was but a presage of things to come, as Derricotte, after graduating in 1965, left Detroit for the East Coast.
At [[Wayne State University]] she earned a [[Bachelor of Arts|B.A.]] in 1965 and an [[Master of Arts (postgraduate)|M.A.]] in 1984 at [[New York University]] in English literature.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.poets.org |title=Toi Derricotte |accessdate=2007-12-12}}</ref>

Her move to [[New York City]] in 1967 was a momentous one, for it was here among white, mostly female intellectuals that Derricotte's poetic voice resurfaced. Unlike the African-American poets of the [[Black Arts Movement]], many of whom heeded [[Amiri Baraka]]'s call for an artistic expression that was decidedly black nationalist, proletarian, and accessible, Derricotte wrote, instead, deeply personal, troubling, often difficult poems that talked more of black families haunted by gender oppression and familial strife than of Black Power and racial solidarity.

==Poetry==

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In Derricotte's poetry, the taboo, the restricted, and the repressed figure prominently; they are often the catalysts that prompt her to write, to confess the painful. Often stylistically compared to so-called [[confessional poets]] like [[Sylvia Plath]] and [[Anne Sexton]], Derricotte, in opting for candor over decorum, wants her "work to be a wedge into the world, as what is real and not what people want to hear." This self-dubbed "white-appearing Black person," reared as a Catholic in a black, working-class Detroit community, complicates the myth of monolithic blackness with poems that speak into consciousness obscure, unconventional black bodies. And in an academy whose poststructuralist theories often either depersonalize bodies with esoteric discourse or overemphasize them with hyperbolic identity politics, Toi Derricotte's poems brave the charged, murky depths of much current poetry, stamping the language with her own complex, quirky vision

She is currently a professor of English at the [[University of Pittsburgh]]. With [[Cornelius Eady]], she co-founded [[Cave Canem Foundation]], a summer workshop for African-American poets.

==Awards and honors==

▲*2012 [[PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry]]

==Books==

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