A poet, memoirist and educator, at the time of the 1994 Conference, Toi Derricotte had written three books: The Empress of the Death House (1978); Natural Birth (1983); and Captivity (1989). Since then, she has authored a memoir, The Black Notebooks (1997), as well as the collections Tender (1997), The Undertaker’s Daughter(2011), and more recently I: New and Selected Poems (2019). Derricotte is the recipient of two fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), two Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Derricotte’s work has been published in a number of journals, including Callaloo, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, New England Review, and American Poetry Review. In 1996, she co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation with Cornelius Eady to cultivate and highlight African-American poetry. In 2009, Derricotte was recognized as a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania.