Cameron Barnett earned his MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge literary magazine and co-coordinator of the Pitt Speakeasy Reading Series. His honors include the O'Donnell Award for Excellence in Poetry from Duquesne University and the Academy of American Poets Graduate Poetry Award from the University of Pittsburgh. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he works as a middle school language arts teacher and is an associate poetry editor for Pittsburgh Poetry Review. The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water is his first book.

Books by Cameron Barnett:

Other poems on the web by Cameron Barnett:
"Theater of America"
"An Honest Prayer"
Three poems
"Between Skin"

About The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water :

"'Maybe if my blood were blue I'd have three hearts like you,' Cameron Barnett writes in one of the many imaginative poems of The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water. Maybe Barnett's blood isn't blue, but it's fueled by the clarity and candor of the blues. Moreover, his poems pulse with the generosity of a three-hearted sensibility: 'one for forgiving, one for forgetting, one for moving on.' These poems weave the personal and public histories rooted in our natures—our gardens, our spirits, our bodies. Compassionate, shrewd, and mature: this is a marvelous debut."
—Terrance Hayes

"Complexity and surprise arrive with each page turn of Cameron Barnett's debut collection, The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water. Barnett's poems push past the 'likes' of these digital days toward the deeply difficult work of self-reflection and discomfort. There is no one way to be Black in the United States and these poems affirm that reality. They are an answer to both Black-checking and America's tired legacy of racism. These poems know to be Black is a beautiful and varied state of being. 'I was told it was a bad thing,' they admit, and then turn that lie on its head."
—Yona Harvey

"Ceaselessly honest and uncannily self-aware, the poems in The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water dance between grace, music, and truth. With a voice that's leaning in instead of away, this collection is a lively and necessary debut that cracks open the complications of skin color, love, and the natural world."
—Ada Limon