Poet Rickey Laurentiis read several of his poems at the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work appeared in NER 36.2.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). He is also the recipient of a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Other honors include fellowships and scholarships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, Fence, the New Republic, Oxford American, Poetry, and many others. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently resides in Brooklyn.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available online. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

“Conditions for a Southern Gothic” and “You Are Not Christ” were originally published in Boy with Thorn. “Continuance” first appeared in the New Republic.