Poet Cornelius Eady, who recently retired from his teaching position at the University of Tennessee (UT) at Knoxville, served as the Inaugural Poet at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration ceremony on Thursday.
Eady retired from his posts as professor and Chair of Excellence for the UT Department of English in August of 2025 after joining the university’s faculty in 2021.
While speaking at the ceremony on Thursday, Eady praised Mamdani, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist and first Muslim mayor of the nation’s largest city, and suggested his victory in the mayoral election is just the beginning for candidates alike across the nation.
“New York was the first capital of the United States, and it seems to me that this might be another kind of new beginning for a certain kind of energy that starts here and goes out across the country, the rest of the nation,” Eady said before reciting his original poem “Proof,” at Mamdani’s inauguration.
Eady went on to dedicate his poem to the “trans, queer, foreign students” at UT-Knoxville.
“Though this is a New York-based poem…I just retired, I’d like to dedicate this poem to my trans, queer, foreign students of color at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,” Eady said.
In addition to UT-Knoxville, Eady has taught poetry over the course of 20 years at SUNY Stony Brook; City College; Sarah Lawrence College; New York University; The Writer’s Voice; The 92nd St Y; The College of William and Mary; Sweet Briar College; and The University of Missouri-Columbia.
Eady has authored several books of poetry and is the cofounder of Cave Canem, an organization for African American poetry and poets.
Among others, Eady’s work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and NAACP Image Award.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Cornelius Eady” by Cornelius Eady and “Mayor Zohran Mamdami” by New York City.
This is a prime example of the crazies that are being hired by our government supported universities. Universities have become pits for vipers sniping at the foundations of the United States. Our legislators should clean house on the liberal boards of regents and high-level administrators who propagate this anti-American garbage.