Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

Poet

he/him

Hudson Valley, NY

Cyrée, a Black trans person in a leopard print shirt and wide-brimmed black hat, rests his head on his hand. Behind him are a potted plant and a tarot card on a glass table.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, New Jersey. Johnson is the author of SLINGSHOT (Nightboat Books, 2019), developed with support by Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship and the Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship, and winner of a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. WATCHNIGHT (Nightboat Books, 2024), his second collection of poetry, received the 2023 James Laughlin Award. He was a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Public Library, and a 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Johnson is currently finishing a novel called Male Girlfriend.