About Cai

Cai (he/him) is a black trans poet, teaching artist, and archivist with roots in Boston, Massachusetts.

He received his undergraduate degree from Smith College, where he helped establish the Weaving Voices Archives, documenting the history of student activism on campus. Upon graduation, he was the recipient of both the Ida B. Wells Prize for Distinguished Work in Africana Studies and the Emily Babcock Poetry Prize.

Cai is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. He is also an alum of The Watering Hole, a 2023 Brooklyn Poets Summer Fellow, and a 2025 Tin House Scholar and LAMBDA Emerging Writers Fellow. Cai is passionate about writing Black trans-masculine lives past & present in Amerikka, calling on a lineage of becoming. He now lives in Chicago, where he serves as a Poet in Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, and is an active member of the Crossroads Writers Collective for Black Queer writers. He is working on his first book, Desire Paths.