Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness, winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water, which was selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the recipient of a Ron Wallace Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, a Stegner Fellowship, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship.