Cameron Barnett
Narrative poet and educator
It’s a crisp, sunny morning in his Garfield neighborhood, but Cameron Barnett is going places, as usual — so much so that the barista at “his” Commonplace Voluto is set to make that green tea and chocolate chip cookie to go.
Instead, the 30-year-old narrative poet and middle school teacher, who’s also a runner and history/space nerd, sits and chats about what’s next now that he’s won a 2019 Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award from The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation.
He likes everything about it — including that the $15,000 comes with no strings — but he loves that it’s for the artist that is “emerging.”
“That’s exactly the word I would choose for myself,” says the author of 2017’s acclaimed “The Drowning Boys Guide to Water.”
He’s using the foundations’ money, including $8,500 they awarded him earlier last year, to work on his second book. In it, he aims to more fully and broadly — historically and geographically — examine his and his family’s black experience in North America. That’s why he has just returned from Las Vegas, one of the places where he’s interviewing older relatives to capture their voices as they tell their stories relating to the civil rights movement and later struggles.
He knows he’s a product of their experiences, with his own story including being born in Los Angeles but raised in Pittsburgh, attending Duquesne University and then getting his master’s degree in fine arts in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh before winding up teaching sixth and seventh graders (to whom he’s “Mr. B”) at his mom’s and his alma mater of Falk Laboratory School.
His avenue of service and activism is telling stories, which he believes is thing that binds all of us.” So especially once summer hits, he needs to get writing and keep moving toward being a Poet with a capital P.
“It’s really humbling and flattering and at the same time a sort of kick in the butt,” he says with an easy smile of his recent recognition. “‘You’re going in the right direction. Keep going.’”