Cosmic Deputy is a literary memoir from esteemed activist, educator, producer, and poet Kalamu ya Salaam. Representative poems from Salaam’s fifty years of writing are interspersed in an overarching essay tracing the poet’s multitude of influences. Toward mapping a theory of a Black literary aesthetic, Salaam explores the cultural inheritances of Black resistance movements, blues music, and the ways in which these sources and others have shaped not only his own work but Black letters more broadly.