Cornelius Eady was born in 1954 in Rochester, New York. He is the author of seven books of poetry. the most recent being the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather (Penguin, 2008), which has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His other titles are: Kartunes, (Warthog Press, 1980); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, (Ommation Press, 1986), winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991), nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don’t Miss Your Water, (Henry Holt and Co., 1995); The Autobiography of a Jukebox (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997); and Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001). His work appears in many journals; magazines; and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, (1750-2000) ed. Michael S. Harper.
With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is co-founder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature (1985); a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, (1993); a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Traveling Scholarship to Tougaloo College in Mississippi (1992-1993); a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, (1993); and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award (1994)
Charlie Mingus wrote this moan-full goodbye, had the horns
Sound like a room filled with old men watching the barge
Slip into the river Lethe towards the other side.
Lost uncles, fathers, brothers, the stink of tobacco, splash of gin,
The coolness some of them carried, the ones we think of
When we remember certain diners.
Because Lester Young had that sound. You can hear it
As he plays with Billie Holiday in a 50’s TV studio:
“Fine and Mellow”; love, that faucet which turns off
Or on. How that dumb hope, the maybe next time
Rises from their lips and tongues and throats.
Because Lester soothes the bruises on Billie’s voice
One last time. They chat, then walk out of the studio
Into love-less New York, never to meet again. In the elegy,
The horns sound like a warm hand clasping a cold one
On the cooling board. Then letting go.