Derrick Austin is the author of three poetry collections including This Elegance (Boa Editions, 2026), Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016), selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. Black Sand, his first chapbook, was published by Foundlings Press in 2022. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Norma Faber First Book Award. Tenderness was a finalist for a Golden Poppy Award, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and a Northern California Book Award. 

His recent honors include a 2026 AICA-USA Art Critic Fellowship and a 2026 Irene Yamamoto Arts Writers Fellowship. He has had poems and essays commissioned by The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, Craft Contemporary, The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, The Brick (formerly LAXART), The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Carnegie Museum. 

A Cave Canem fellow, Austin served as the 2016-2017 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. He was a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University as well as a 2022-2023 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar. He lives in Chicago.

For more information about Derrick Austin, visit https://derricklynnaustin.wixsite.com/authorpage or follow him @Paradiselaust.