Cameron Awkward-Rich
American poet
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Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and academic. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection Sympathetic Little Monster, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Dispatch, which won the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award.[1][2] In addition, he has published the chapbook Transit.
Awkward-Rich earned a PhD from Stanford University's program in Modern Thought and Literature before spending time at Duke University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Transgender Studies & Humanities Project with the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies.[3] As of February 2026, he teaches women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.[4]
Awkward-Rich was a Keynote Speaker for the 2020 Thinking Trans/Trans Thinking Conference, organized by the Trans Philosophy Project.[citation needed] He was also a Featured Poet during the 2020 Split This Rock Poetry Festival, a gathering in Washington, DC, organized biennially around social justice themes.[5]
He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Publications
Books
An Optimism. New York: Persea Books, 2025.
The Terrible We: Thinking With Trans Maladjustment. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022.
Dispatch: poems. New York: Persea Books, 2019.
Sympathetic Little Monster. Los Angeles: Richocet Editions, 2016.
Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation (with Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, Beyza Ozer, Kay Ulanday Barrett). Little Rock: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017.
Chapbooks
Transit. Gardena: Button Poetry, 2017.
Craft Essays
"Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive."[6]
Interviews
Gow, Robin. "Trying to Feel A Part of Some Kind of 'We': A Conversation With Cameron Awkward-Rich."[7]
Marshell, Kyla. "The Pen Ten with Cameron Awkward-Rich."[8]
Scholarly Articles
"The Fiction of Ethnography in Charlotte Perkin Gilman's Herland." Science Fiction Studies, v43 n2 (2016): 331–350.