Thurs 4/16 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Cortney Lamar Charleston is joined by Patricia Smith to discuss his new collection of poems from Northwestern University Press.

“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” In his sweeping third collection, Charleston brings a poet’s ear for echo and rhythm to bear on American history and life after 2016. For Charleston, these rhymes cut two ways: the long tradition of American racism and fascism, and the steady pulse of Black persistence. The collection’s titular invocation frames each poem, at times an oratory to rally a crowd, in other moments a private prayer whispered as the speaker gathers himself to face another day. Charleston insists that should we cede memory of our national biography—whether to repression or indifference—we will witness the country’s dissolution into something unrecognizable to many, yet all too familiar to its most marginalized people. But with each reiteration and riff, he also invokes a tenuous hope—that if we summon an American history of Black resistance, we might still make a more perfect union.

“Poetry for our precarious moment, as Charleston has crafted an unmistakably resonant testament to the power and necessity of resistance.” —Chicago Review of Books

“This collection has moved me so completely, kept me rapt in wonder at its incisive craft and heady treatises-in-verse. While It’s Important I Remember rails, seethes, and spews its rage in equal doses, it also soothes, goads, and, finally, exhorts.” —L. Lamar Wilson, author of Sacrilegion

“This is more than a collection of poetry; these poems are a portal into Cortney Lamar Charleston’s brilliant mind. They challenge orthodoxy, they mine the archives, they expand our imaginations. It’s Important I Remember is magnificent.” —Clint Smith, author of Above Ground: Poems 

“Cortney Lamar Charleston’s It’s Important I Remember considers American history’s relentless patterns while confronting our existence within its centuries-old design. Ambitious and unflinching, these poems are lessons in curiosity and compassion—'favor[ing] the right answer, not the correct one.’” —Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), named a best book of 2021 by the New York Public Library and The Boston Globe; and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2026). He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review and many other periodicals and anthologies. Charleston currently serves on the Haymarket Books Poetry Advisory Board.

Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She received the 2025 National Book Award for poetry for her book The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. Her many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York.