Cameron Barnett Featured on WPSU’s Poetry Moment

Cameron Barnett was recently featured on WPSU’s Poetry Moment, where host Marjorie Maddox introduced his poem, “Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS.”

In this haunting piece, Barnett adopts the voice of the ghost of fourteen-year-old Emmett, brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi in 1955 for “allegedly” whistling at a white woman. Through the speaker’s wry, observant, devastatingly direct nature, humor and horror sit side by side: “death, too, is a snore,” he says, even as the poem insists on the urgency of remembrance, calling us not backward in nostalgia, but forward into responsibility.

Barnett, a Pittsburgh-based poet and educator, is the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water and Murmur, both published by Autumn House Press. His work explores race, place, and the layered realities of Black life in America, and often asks how memory, silence, and survival shape one another.

As Black History Month transitions into Read Across America Day, Barnett’s poem underscores the responsibility that comes with reading: to witness, to learn, and to remember.

To view the full feautre go to WPSU here.