Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, New Jersey. He is the author of SLINGSHOT, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Johnson was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and served as the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. WATCHNIGHT, winner of the 2023 James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets, his forthcoming book of poetry, considers ancestry as history in the context of the Great Black Migration of the 20th century, familial estrangement, and queer family. He is a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.