Rickey Laurentiis (b. 1989, February 7) was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. Their writing has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017), Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded them a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, they traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. Laurentiis received a MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where they were a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow, and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where they read literature and queer theory.
They are the trans author of Death of the First Idea, forthcoming in 2025 from Knopfs, and Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. Boy with Thorn was also named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry book by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions.
Individual poems have appeared widely, including Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry and has been anthologized in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers Speak of Palestine, Bettering American Poetry, A Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation. As a curator and art writer, their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prospect.3's art catalogue Notes for Now, the Andy Warhol Museums's Devan Shimoyama: Cry Baby, the Clyfford Still Museums's Museum of the Invisible Woman and they have partnered on other curatorial collaborations or programs with the Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, John Hopkins Archaelogical Museum, and the the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Laurentiis' interests include art history, visual culture and ekphrasis, shade, revisionary logics, the global south, pleasure, penetration, transness and the body, radical justice, and shame. They have taught at a selection of institutions, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the 92nd Street Y. They are the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh, and serves on the executive board for the Black Art Futures Fund.
