Poet who taught at Stony Brook: 'Another kind of new beginning'
Cornelius Eady reads a poem. Credit: Newsday/Matthew Chayes
Cornelius Eady, who has taught graduate poetry at Stony Brook University, read an original poem at the inauguration that he dedicated to trans, queer and foreign students of color at the University of Knoxville in Tennessee.
New Yorkers, he said, likely joked during the campaign that Mamdani would get elected when “hell freezes over. So here we are,” he told the crowd watching in frigid temperatures, to laughter and applause.
The poet highlighted that New York was the nation’s first capital.
“And it seems to me that this might be another kind of new beginning for a certain kind of energy that might start here and goes across the country to the rest of the nation,” Eady said.
Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.
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