Cortney Lamar Charleston

The Basics

Cortney Lamar Charleston is originally from the Chicago suburbs. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a BS in Economics from the Wharton School and BA in Urban Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences. While attending Penn, he began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project.

Charleston's long-time academic interests in history, sociology, political science and economics, coupled with his upbringing spent bouncing between Chicago’s South Side and its South and West suburbs, immediately influence his written work. Charleston’s poems paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present; they grapple with race, masculinity, class, family, faith and how identity is, functionally, a transition zone between all of these competing markers (and more). Said differently, his poetry is a call for a more involved understanding of the diversity of the human experience that allows us to lean into genuine love for and beyond the communities we are part of, a love whose expression is inextricably linked to justice at its core.

Recognition

Cortney Lamar Charleston's poems have appeared in a range of publications, including POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review and Granta. A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, Charleston has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His debut full-length poetry collection, Telepathologies, was selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and released in March 2017. His second full-length collection, Doppelgangbanger, was released in February 2021 by Haymarket Books and named a best book of 2021 by the New York Public Library and the Boston Globe. His third full-length collection, It’s Important I Remember, is forthcoming from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press in February 2026. He is a poet Essence magazine thinks you should know.