Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to care. Her debut book, Boy with Thorn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and finalized for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They’ve partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art and lead a conversation at the Museum of Modern Art. Fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem and the Whiting Foundation have honored her, and she was inaugural fellow at Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her much anticipated second collection, Death of the First Idea, is forthcoming this fall from Knopf.