Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and a Golden Poppy Award nominee, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016) selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the 2017 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the 2017 Norma Faber First Book Award. A chapbook, Black Sand, is forthcoming from Foundlings Press in early 2022.

Books by Derrick Austin:

Other poems on the web by Derrick Austin:
Three poems
Two poems
Two poems
Two poems
"In The Decadence of Silence"
"Cedars of Lebanon"
"Paolo Uccello's Birds"
"Blaxploitation"
"The Witching Hour"
Two poems
Three poems
Three poems

Derrick Austin's Website.

Derrick Austin on Twitter.

About Tenderness:

"Derrick Austin is to a blank page what Titian was to a white canvas. In both of their works, audiences will find an exemplary adroitness with portrait, landscape, and myth. Tenderness, Austin's second poetry collection, weaves a sinuous lyric that navigates both the physical and metaphysical surroundings of a traveler desirous of understanding, desirous of being understood. The reader senses a certain urgency in the question of how to find tenderness and connection in a world intent on the project of othering. Austin skillfully excavates the rhizomatic truth of belonging and the vulnerable places where God can be found—a touch, a glance, a history, a remembrance."
—Airea D. Matthews

"It's nice to know that poetry is still a place to go and find some Tenderness, and Derrick Austin's gentle touch is filled with genuine compassion and those soft wounds of the heart that act as release. 'A heaven wider than androgyny is sugar on my tongue.' The world is not shut out but let in, writ in dew and dust, ecstatic invocations and quiet elegies, hurricanes and the calm just after. After all, tenderness is not only sweet. It is also the place where we recognize the threshold of pain. 'There's a snowbank / of roses on the sidewalk / where America unmade me.'"
—D. A. Powell