Background
Jericho Brown was born in 1976 in Shreveport, Louisiana, United States. He is the son of Nelson Demery Jr. and Neomia Demery. He grew up with his younger sister Nequella.
2015
Jericho Brown at the 46th NAACP Image Awards on February 6, 2015, in Pasadena, California.
2601 Gentilly Blvd, New Orleans, LA 70122, United States
Dillard University where Jericho Brown received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
2000 Lakeshore Dr, New Orleans, LA 70148, United States
The University of New Orleans where Jericho Brown received a Master of Fine Arts degree.
4800 Calhoun Rd, Houston, TX 77004, United States
The University of Houston where Jericho Brown received a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown with his sister.
Jericho with his family on Christmas Day in 2008.
(Please explores the points in our lives at which love and...)
Please explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, Please is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African American/male identity and sexuality.
https://www.amazon.com/Please-First-Book-Jericho-Brown/dp/1930974795/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(In The New Testament, Jericho Brown continues his tender ...)
In The New Testament, Jericho Brown continues his tender examination of race, masculinity, and sexuality. 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.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Jericho-Brown/dp/1556594577/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the...)
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie?
https://www.amazon.com/Tradition-Jericho-Brown/dp/1556594860/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Jericho Brown was born in 1976 in Shreveport, Louisiana, United States. He is the son of Nelson Demery Jr. and Neomia Demery. He grew up with his younger sister Nequella.
Jericho Brown graduated from Dillard University, where he was initiated as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, through the Beta Phi chapter, in the fall of 1995. He also graduated from the University of New Orleans with a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing, and from the University of Houston with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in literature and creative writing.
Before earning his Doctor of Philosophy degree, Jericho Brown worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans. He was a teaching fellow at the English department of 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. He is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
His first book Please was published in 2008, the second book was published for six years. The latest book is entitled The Tradition.
(Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the...)
2019(In The New Testament, Jericho Brown continues his tender ...)
2014(Please explores the points in our lives at which love and...)
2008Jericho Brown was raised as a Baptist. He no longer considers himself a member of that religion. There are some things Jericho misses about the Baptist church and others he is glad to do without.
Jericho Brown was twenty-three years old when he decided to become a poet. He met Terrance Hayes at a reading by a man named Niyi Osundare at Xavier University. There he read a poem after which Terrance Hayes asked Brown about poets, about New Orleans. It was the most amazing thing that happened to him. At that point, Brown realized that he can do something that he can be identified in this way. And he began to take on as an identity.
Quotations:
“Poetry is a veil in front of a heart beating at a very fast pace.”
“I prefer paper for the whole of a book and for work I’m marking. I want to read things that feel as vulnerable as paper.”
“Every last word is contagious.”
"I do my best writing when I am most vulnerable to the writing when I allow for the construction of images and lines that, in the midst of composing, frighten me."
Brown has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.
When Jericho Brown's father found out he was going to be an English major, he didn’t speak to Jericho for a very long time. The same was also about his sexuality. His parents have no patience with the fact he is gay.
Church taught Jericho to be comfortable with vulnerability, an important skill for a poet who mines his personal experiences - the good and the bad - for inspiration. As a boy, he often had to summon the courage to deliver speeches before large audiences in his church. That taught him about poise - and performance.
Quotes from others about the person
"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. Brown’s poems are living on the page, and they give the reader that much: a sense of having been alive fully." - Ilya Kaminsky about Jericho Brown's book Please.
Jericho Brown's partner is Derrick Franklin.