Jericho Brown

Poet Class of 2024

Reflecting on contemporary culture and identity in works that combine formal experimentation and intense self-examination.

Location

Atlanta, Georgia

Age

48 at time of award

Area of Focus

Poetry

Website(s)

jerichobrown.com Emory University: Jericho Brown

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About Jericho's Work

Jericho Brown is a poet reflecting on contemporary culture and identity in works that combine formal experimentation and intense self-examination. He reimagines well-known poetic forms and rhythmic structures in ways that heighten a poem’s emotional charge. Across three collections, Brown explores themes of masculinity, spirituality, family, sexuality, and racial identity from a personal perspective as well as from feelings inspired by pop culture and contemporary America.

In his first collection, Please (2008), Brown incorporates influences from popular music, such as replicating syncopation of classic rhythm and blues, as he describes the sometimes blurred boundary between intimacy and violence. Brown’s second book, The New Testament (2014), draws connections between individual suffering and broader injustices such as the HIV/AIDS crisis, mass incarceration, and community trauma. In several poems, Brown reworks biblical passages to emphasize the isolation and oppression that many experience in America. Brown’s calibration of form, tone, and language is even more fully realized in The Tradition (2019). He introduces a form of his own invention—the duplex (or gutted sonnet)—that is a fusion of the traditional sonnet, the Arabic ghazal, and the ironic holler of American blues. It is comprised of 14 lines of 7 couplets, with the first line of each couplet echoing the second line of the previous one, and the last line echoing the poem’s first. The circular repetition lends itself to shifts between dissonant voices or images; for example, in one duplex the speaker’s train of thought moves from a first love, to his abusive father, to his grieving mother. In other variations on the sonnet form, shifting perspectives bring the reader face-to-face with violence inflicted on Black lives. The title poem in The Tradition begins like a pastoral lyric, with a list of flower names: “Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium.” Brown deftly touches on the evolution of Black life in America in relation to the land—sharecropping and climate change—before pulling the reader firmly into the present moment with a lament for lives cut short at the hands of police: “John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”

Brown writes with frankness and vulnerability about love, both filial and erotic. He explores the complexities of his identity as a Black gay man and expresses tenderness and devotion toward his mother and other Black women. In poems with astonishing lyrical beauty, Brown illuminates the experiences of marginalized people and shows the relevance and value of formal experimentation.

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Biography

Jericho Brown received a BA (1998) from Dillard University, an MFA (2002) from the University of New Orleans, and a PhD (2007) from the University of Houston. He is the editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill (2023) and of The Selected Shepherd (2024), a selected volume of poems by the late Reginald Shepherd. Since 2012, he has been affiliated with Emory University and is currently the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing. Previously, he served as an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego (2007–2012). His poems have appeared in publications such as American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and TIME Magazine, as well as in several volumes of anthologies.

“The best way to describe my work is to say I write what humans of every society all over the world historically need. I write what the spirit reads.”

“People keep telling me poetry is some kind of marginal literature, but none of them have a novel behind a magnet on a refrigerator, or a memoir attached to the corner of a bedroom mirror, or a screenplay tucked into the driver's visor in a car. We keep poems anywhere and everywhere and we recite them and lines from them while we wait to hear a diagnosis, while we wash dishes, while we endure violences committed against family members and the planet itself because something in us knows we will need them. Something in us knows that we get no warning when we’ll need poems most. And often, we only need one. Many of us are making use of the same beautiful poem over and over again for sustenance. The best way to describe my work is to say I write what humans of every society all over the world historically need. I write what the spirit reads.”

—Jericho Brown

Published on October 1, 2024

Photos of Jericho Brown

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