How do you have collective action without collective imagination?”Īwkward-Rich was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Transgender Studies & Humanities Project with the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. His more critical writing can be found in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly, and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Duke University and the American Council of Learned Societies.Īsked in an interview if books can influence social change, Awkward-Rich responded : “I actually think it’s quite weird to imagine that social change can happen without literature, since books of various kinds (and I’m counting oral traditions as “books” here) tend to be where ideas are stored and transmitted, where each generation learns all over again what the world is like, and has been like, and might be. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation.Īlso a scholar of trans theory and expressive culture in the U.S., Cameron earned his PhD from Stanford University's program in Modern Thought & Literature.

He is also the author of two collections of poetry: Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), finalist for a LAMBDA Literary Award. Cameron Awkward-Rich's most recent book is The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022).

Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich