Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte (pronounced DARE-ah-cot ) (born April 12, 1941 in Hamtramck, Michigan) is an American poet and a professor of writing at University of Pittsburgh.

She won a 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, a summer workshop for African-American poets.

Biography

Derricotte was born the daughter of Antonia Baquet, a Creole from Louisiana, and Benjamin Sweeney Webster, a Kentucky native, and later half-sister to Benjamin, Jr. At around ten or eleven years old, she began a secret journal that included, among other things, the disintegration of her parents' marriage and the death of her grandmother on whom she was very emotionally dependent. During her years at Detroit's Girls Catholic Central High School, Derricotte recounts a religious education that she felt was steeped in images of death and punishment, a Catholicism that, according to the poet, morbidly paraded "the crucifixion, saints, martyrs in the Old Testament and the prayers of the Mass." Coupled with these images were Derricotte's surreal reminiscences of childhood visits to her paternal grandparents' home, the bottom part of which served as a funeral parlor where bodies were prepared for viewing. Often she would stay overnight at her grandparents', where, unafraid, she would "pray over the bodies … especially … disturbed when young people died, children, babies."