Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal and the Academy of American Poets. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.
Brown is the author of two books of poetry. His most recent collection, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), was described by Yusef Komunyakaa as a chronicle of “life and death, personal rituals and blasphemies, race and nation, the good and the bad” that illuminates “scenarios of self-interrogation and near redemption.”
Brown is the author of two books of poetry. His most recent collection, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), was described by Yusef Komunyakaa as a chronicle of “life and death, personal rituals and blasphemies, race and nation, the good and the bad” that illuminates “scenarios of self-interrogation and near redemption.”
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Out of Our Minds Radio Show
JP Dancing Bear's interview with Jericho Brown from the host's weekly radio show for public radio KKUP featuring some of today's best contemporary poets. |
Heavy as Heaven: The Apocryphal Gospel of Jericho BrownOne’s lover—or one’s brother, or one’s enemy—sees the face you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions.--James Baldwin
"In his second poetry collection, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press), Jericho Brown enlarges the three archetypal figures presented in the book’s epigraph—the lover, the brother, and the enemy—to include everything and everyone, in heaven and on earth. (Baldwin may have been slighting our capacity to respond to each other in love, fraternity, or hatred; our glares and gestures, good and ugly, can always appear divine in the right light.) For Brown it’s by degrees of desire that these three distinctions are affirmed or sundered..." ~read the complete article in Trop |
Please (New Issues, 2008), won the 2009 American Book Award. The collection has received tremendous praise since its release; Ilya Kaminsky notes: “His lyrics are memorable, muscular, majestic. His voice in these lines is alive—something that is quite rare in his generation of very bookish and very ironic poetics. Indeed, Jericho Brown’s first book is one of those rare things: a debut of a master poet.”
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Of, The New Testament, NPR's Craig Morgan Teicher says, "If further proof is needed — though of course it is not — that the tensions exploding in Ferguson have been brewing for centuries, this book is, among other things, proof enough. In the clean, clear lyrics of his second book, Jericho Brown, who was born in Louisiana and formerly worked as speechwriter for a New Orleans mayor, laments, with no small sense of sad resignation, a muffled kind of anger, and a pinch of sarcasm, that, as an African-American man he finds himself admitting, 'Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I'm still a reason why.'"
Copper Canyon Press
These poems bear witness to survival in the face of brutality, while also elegizing two brothers haunted by shame, two lovers hounded by death, and an America wounded by war and numbered by religion. Brown summons myth, fable, and fairytale not to merely revise the Bible--more so to write the kind of lyric poetry we find at the source of redemption--for the profane and for the sacred.
Copper Canyon Press
These poems bear witness to survival in the face of brutality, while also elegizing two brothers haunted by shame, two lovers hounded by death, and an America wounded by war and numbered by religion. Brown summons myth, fable, and fairytale not to merely revise the Bible--more so to write the kind of lyric poetry we find at the source of redemption--for the profane and for the sacred.