Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown (born Nelson Demery III; born April 14, 1976) is an American poet. In 2020, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize  for Poetry.

Life
Brown was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana. He graduated from Dillard University in 1995. He later went to graduate school.  He got a Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans and a Ph.D from the University of Houston.

Brown was a teaching fellow in the English department at the University of Houston from 2002 to 2007, a visiting professor at San Diego State University's MFA program in spring 2009, and an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego. He has also taught at numerous conferences and workshops, including the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. Now he is an associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

His poems have appeared in  many magazines.  Some of the magazines where his poetry has been published are The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, The New Yorker, Enkare Review and The Best American Poetry. He serves as an Assistant Editor at Callaloo. His first book, Please won the American Book Award. His book of poetry, The New Testament, (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

The Pulitzer Prizes' home-page calls The Tradition "A collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence."

Style
The poet has invented a new poetry form.  He calls it "duplex."  In a duplex poem, first there is a couplet.  Then the second line is repeated with a new line. This is "repeated and a new line is added, and then repeated until there are seven couplets of nine to eleven syllables each. ... The first line is [repeated as] the fourteenth line."

Quotations
“I’m more than a conqueror, bigger / Than bravery. I don’t march. I’m the one who leaps.”
"A poem is a gesture toward home."

Awards
 2020 Pulitzer Prize
 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship 
 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
 2015 Thomas-Gunn Award 
 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry
 2009 American Book Award for Please
 2009 Whiting Award
 2009–2010 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University
 Kraków Poetry Seminar in Poland, travel fellowships
 Cave Canem Fellowship
 Bread Loaf Writer's Conference two scholarships

Works
 Books
 
 
 

 Poems
 , Oxford American, October 2014
 "Elegy", Rumpus, May 2009
 , AGNI, March 2007
 "To Be Seen", The Missouri Review

References

Other websites

 
 'Love in Contemporary American Gay Male Poetry in the Works of Richard Siken, Eduardo C Corral and Jericho Brown' Simeon Kronenberg, Cordite Poetry Review (2015).
 "Profile at The Whiting Foundation"
 "Danger by Desire: A Conversation between Jericho Brown & James Allen Hall", Boxcar Poetry Review
 "Naming Each Place"
 Until the Fulcrum Tips: A Conversation with Rita Dove and Jericho Brown, The Best American Poetry
 "Jericho Brown Presents The Phantastique 5", The Best American Poetry
 https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/jericho-brown-reflects-on-winning-the-pulitzer-prize-and-the-black-poets-who-came-before-him/

1976 births
African American writers
American poets
Gay men
Living people
LGBT African Americans
LGBT people from Louisiana
LGBT poets
People from Shreveport, Louisiana
Pulitzer Prize winners
Writers from Louisiana