Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

"To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius." — Claudia Rankine

"Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry." — Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Brown's subtleties in the narrative create great irony, feel refined. We are led to believe the renewed expression of the speaker's homosexuality is something his father could never truly understand. Brown gives us a space for all emotional selves to come together and embrace commonality of experience." — David Crews

"His lyrics are memorable, muscular, majestic... Brown's poems are living on the page." — Ilya Kaminsky

"These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don't merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters--loss, desire, rage, becoming--and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense. Like the music that runs through this collection, they get inside of you and make something there ache. It's a feeling that doesn't quite go away--and you won't want it to. This is one of the most luminous and courageous voices I have read in a long, long time." — U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

"Exquisite, incisive, as full of the spirit as the soil, the breath and the body, Jericho Brown's newest collection The Tradition is today's essential poetry." —John Keene