Cortney Lamar Charleston is an emerging poet living in Jersey City, NJ. Though an East Coast resident, he's a Midwest native, having spent his formative years in Chicagoland. His connection to the area remains strong, and serves as a frequent backdrop for his poems, which often bounce between scenes in the inner city and the suburbs, where Cortney lived with his parents, brother and sisters. He left the area at age 18 to pursue his collegiate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a dual-degree student enrolled in The Wharton School and The College of Arts & Sciences; in 2012, he graduated with a BS in Economics with a concentration in Business & Public Policy from the Wharton School and a BA in Urban Studies from The College.

 

Cortney discovered his passion for verse as an undergraduate student at Penn. During his freshman year, while hosting a friend and prospective student, he purchased a pair of tickets to see a performance by The Excelano Project, Penn's premier performance poetry/spoken word collective, which he heard was extremely accomplished on the national scene. Though he thought it would simply be a fun activity for he and his visitor, the show left Cortney completely floored, as the poets, in each of their unique voices, moved gracefully between topics both heavy and light: from love and heartbreak, to racial oppression, to grief, to feminism and everywhere in between. The performances inspired him immensely. Needing an outlet to help purge his deepest blues and to engage his strong and evolving political and social consciousness, Cortney began writing in hopes of joining the group. One year after seeing that show, Cortney was on stage as a member of the troupe, and performed with them until his senior year, during which he was President. 

 

Poetry has been an integral part of his life ever since. Post-graduation, Cortney has dedicated himself to further development of his craft, using verse as a method of engagement around the politics of identity and marginalization, as well as an exploration of the fragility of relationships to other people and to the self. Recent work has appeared or been accepted for publication in numerous periodicals, including Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Eleven Eleven, Crab Orchard Review, The Normal School, Folio, J Journal, Kweli Journal, Winter Tangerine Review and CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action. His poems have received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize, a nomination for Best of the Net, and recently earned him a fellowship from the Cave Canem Foundation. Outside of poetry, Cortney manages BLACK PANTONE with his brilliant partner/girlfriend, Ruani Ribe, a digital space dispelling monolithic interpretation of black identity by providing black people to define their own shade of blackness through narrative and image. To keep the lights on, he works full-time in market research and analytics in New York City; it's going well so far.