Chaun Ballard

Ballard’s manuscript, Love Letters to My Future Self, was selected as the winner of the Cave Canem 2025 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize and is published by O, Miami Books.

In partnership with the O, Miami Poetry Festival and Cave Canem, in April of 2026, Ballard was awarded a residency at The Writer’s Room in The Betsy Hotel-South Beach, generously funded by the family of poet Hyam Plutzik and the Plutzik Goldwasser Family Foundation.

Of the collection, poet and judge giovanni singleton writes:

“Chaun Ballard’s Love Letters to My Future Self stands as a layered consideration of memory, race, and inheritance, through imagery that is at once immense and intimate. The ‘letters’ of the collection’s title address not a single ‘self’ but a gathering of historical, generational selves…

…Nature appears as both refuge and indictment. Birds, linden trees, and steepled rocks form a counter-church in the quest for freedom. However, the pastoral is never innocent; it bears history’s weight. Images of growth through rupture, like mint pushing through sidewalks, echo Gwendolyn Brooks’s urban gardens and Robert Hayden’s weathered landscapes — spaces where survival is simultaneously botanical and political.

…Ultimately, Love Letters to My Future Self is preoccupied with address — speaking to a ‘you’ who is descendant and alter ego…Ballard understands that lyric beauty can coexist with historical indictment. The result is a collection that is as much archive as love letter…”