Jericho Brown Biography

Please (New Issues, 2008), Jericho Brown's debut poetry collection, won the 2009 American Book Award and has garnered a tonne of attention since its publication. According to Terrance Hayes, "Please is imbued with an exquisite passion that feeds Jericho Brown's elegies fire and his odes melancholy. This is the poetry of blood ship: the significance of love, family, and sexuality; the reverberations of suffering; and the potential for atonement. That there are so many individuals naming and being named here is understandable. It is understandable that Jericho Brown and his misfits, divas, and innocent victims would scream out and respond to "a please that sounds like music." I could never express how much I like this book—it is intimate, honest, and immediate. The New Testament, his second book of poetry, was published by Copper Canyon in 2014 and was selected as one of the finest books of the year by Library Journal. When reviewing this book for NPR, Craig Morgan Teicher noted that the poems were "always beautiful, full of a music that is a cross between the sinuous sentences of Carl Phillips, the forceful descriptions of Mark Doty, and hip rhythms of Terrance Hayes," despite the fact that they never stopped speaking through gritted teeth and never quite made the choice between hope and fear. They demonstrate that Brown is a member of a new generation of black and gay writers who are reluctant to limit their identities in their work (Hilton Als' outstanding nonfiction book White Girls is another recent example). These poems provide a strange kind of optimism because Brown's ambivalence reveals a frail faith in the potential for change and the power of the human will. Before obtaining his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, Jericho Brown, a Louisiana native, served as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans. In addition to The Best American Poetry, he has poems in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other publications. He was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Hurston Wright Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. He also graduated with a magna cum laude from Dillard University and has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of New Orleans. Brown resides in Atlanta, Georgia, and works as an assistant professor at Emory University.

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