cave canem

Close to 30 years later and now a registered nonprofit, Cave Canem is able to offer free tuition for its annual summer retreat.

To Lynne Thompson, a former poet laureate of Los Angeles and the current board president of Cave Canem, therein lies the key conceit of the program.

Most of all, though, Cave Canem is a reflection of the ethos everyone involved in it has brought to bear on the endeavor.

With yearlong programming and two annual book prizes of its own, Cave Canem’s mission is best exemplified by those two weeks a year spent at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Pa., where the retreat has been based since 2003.

������ the opening circle offered and continues to offer Cave Canem fellows is the space to be fully, truly themselves.