Cave Canem Presents “deep like the rivers...”: A Report on Black Poets

Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, and the 61st poet laureate of Texas. She is the author of Another Way to Say Enter and the editor of Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has received honors from the Watermill Center and the Academy of American Poets. She is a former board president of the Cave Canem Foundation and is the founder of Torch Literary Arts.

Barbara-Shae Jackson, PhD, is a research scientist, writer, and meaning maker. A daughter of Montgomery, Alabama, raised in Naples, Italy, Jackson grounds her work in an enduring interest in how we learn to see: how culture and experience shape what we notice, what we value, and the meanings we attach to one another and the world around us. Select projects include work with the Obama Foundation, Barr Foundation, City of Charlotte, Field Museum, Norman Rockwell Museum, Museum Hue, and Cave Canem. Her doctoral research in cognitive psychology spurred a 2017 TEDx talk, “The Color Line: Black and White Aesthetic Values,” and the 2020 exhibition When They See Us, What Do They See? Perspectives on Black Art at the Paul R. Jones Museum. She is the lead author of a chapter on aesthetic preference and perception in Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures and is currently writing a book that develops her theory of racial meaning and its connection to aesthetic experience.

Jasmine Mans is a Black American author and CEO of Buy Weed From Women. Her poetry book, BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME (Penguin Random House), was named one of Oprah’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books, Essence’s #1 Contemporary Black Poet to Know, and winner of the Stonewall Book Award - Best Poetry designation by the American Library Association Black Caucus, and Best Book Cover 2021. Mans contributed poetry to The 1619 Project and most recently collaborated with the Brooklyn Ballet on an original performance piece at the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mans’s documentary, Flowers for Mom, produced in collaboration with BWFW and delving into mothers’ health-related experiences using cannabis, earned a Clio Advertising Award. Mans has collaborated with brands like Ulta Beauty and Panagia, and she and her work have been featured in The LA Times, The Tamron Hall Show, O, Forbes, Elle, Essence, Nylon, Glamour, The Root, and Interview, among other outlets.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, arts educator, and podcast host. He is the author of Worldly Things, which won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. Kleber-Diggs’s second book, My Weight in Water, a memoir about his complicated but enduring love of lap swimming, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2028. His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, practices he believes are simultaneously distinct and interdependent. Kleber-Diggs teaches creative writing through the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, at Hamline University, and at universities throughout the Twin Cities. He also cohosts, with Erin Sharkey, the podcast Into a Darker Wilderness. Kleber-Diggs is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a newly retired tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. They have a daughter, Elinor, who lives in New York City and works as a professional dancer and choreographer.

Photo Credit: Ayanna Muata

Lisa Willis is the executive director of Cave Canem, a nonprofit founded in 1996 by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to foster the artistic and professional growth of Black poets. With over 20 years of experience in arts management, she has worked in both the nonprofit and commercial sectors for numerous organizations and artistic projects, including founding the literary collective Getting Word: Black Literature for Black Liberation, serving as the coprincipal for Magnitude and Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations (2025), and leading the upcoming multidisciplinary research project, “deep like the rivers…”: A Report on Black Poets, to be released in April 2027.

Photo credit: Nicholas Nichols