Cornelius Eady (born 1954) is an American writer focusing largely on matters of race and society. His poetry, often praised for its simplicity and plainspokenness, centers on jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class. He is a cofounder of the Cave Canem fellowship for poets of the African diaspora.
Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, New York, and is an author of seven volumes of poetry. In most of Eady's poems, there is a musical quality drawn from the blues and jazz.
Eady collaborated with jazz composer Diedre Murray in the production of several musical theater pieces, including You Don't Miss Your Water (1997), Running Man (1999), Fangs, and Brutal Imagination.[5] Peter Marks, writing in the New York Times described Running Man as "operating at the exotic juncture where chamber musical, jazz session and opera might converge."[5]Running Man was a finalist for the Pultizer Prize for drama in 1999.[3]
Eady's work has also appeared in Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts.[6]
After voting for Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 New York City mayoral election, he was selected to perform an inaugural poem at the mayor-elect's inauguration on January 1, 2026. The poem was excerpted in the New York Times on December 30, 2025.[3]
Works
Eady's first book of poetry, Kartunes, was published in 1980, with several books of poetry following it. He is also the author of Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, which won the 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets; BOOM, BOOM, BOOM: A Chapbook (1988); The Gathering of My Name; You Don't Miss Your Water; and the autobiography of a jukebox (Carnegie Mellon, 1997). Eady's most recent collection of poetry, Brutal Imagination, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry.
One of his most popular works, Eady's book Brutal Imagination (2001) comprises two cycles of poems, each confronting the same subject: the black man in white America. The first cycle, which carries the book's title, is narrated largely by the "imaginary black man that Susan Smith blamed for kidnapping her two children when in fact she had strapped her babies into the back of their family car and pushed the car into John D. Long Lake and let them drown. It took nine days for the authorities— the FBI and the sheriff— to break her story and so the premise is that for those nine days, that man is alive and walking among us, and it's a big what if: What if he could talk? What if he had the ability to speak? What would he have told us?"[9]
The second cycle, "Running Man", focuses on the African-American family and the barriers of color and class. The title character represents every African-American male who has crashed into these barriers.
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