Cameron Conaway is a very unique combination of poetry author and MMA fighter. His book Malaria, Poems was dedicated to the global problem. Let’s learn something more about Cameron and his works!

– What are your last two books — Until You Make the Shore and Malaria, Poems — about?
– Until You Make the Shore grew from my experiences teaching creative writing in the Pima County Juvenile Detention in Tucson, Arizona. I studied criminal justice at Penn State Altoona and knew fairly well the absurdities of our system, so when I went to graduate school to study poetry I felt the need to help our youth by using whatever tools I had. Writing had been transformative in my life so I tried to extract those lessons and share them. The book, told through the voices of four fictionalized female juveniles, seeks to expose some of the madness while layering it with hope.
Malaria, Poems was a result of working with the Wellcome Trust in London and with the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok. Again, it was a matter of recognizing a global problem and seeing if I was in an environment or had any tools to try to help in some regard. After much pondering around the question, Can Poetry Help End Malaria?, I decided to go for it. The result is the first contemporary book of poetry about malaria’s impact on the world.
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