Cameron Awkward-Rich

Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet and a scholar of trans theory/expressive culture. Awkward-Rich received his B.A. in English and Biology from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His writing and teaching creatively combine trans/feminist/queer theory, disability studies, black studies, and poetry and other forms of experimental writing to explore transgender aesthetics and cultural production, the conflicted histories of trans/feminist/queer thought in the U.S., and collective affect/feeling. 

His book, The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022), was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in LGBTQ literature and cultural studies. The Terrible We thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, the book argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. His current projects extend this orientation and include an edited volume of Red Jordan Arobateau’s life-writing --Time Also Will Make It Interesting: Selected Journals of Red Jordan Arobateau (Nightboat Books, 2026) -- and a monograph exploring a genealogy of U.S. black/trans creativity, from Pauli Murray’s 1930s to the present. Awkward-Rich’s other academic writing has appeared in Signs, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, Feminist Formations, and elsewhere and has been supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Awkward-Rich is also the author of three collections of poetry, most recently An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025), which won the Massachusetts Book Award. His creative writing has appeared, in various forms, in Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song: A Library of America Anthology, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem and the Lannan Foundation.  

Before coming to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Awkward-Rich was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Transgender Studies & Humanities Project with the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University.