Jericho Brown, February 6, 2014
6:00 p.m., RJ Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center
Pulaski Technical College, North Little Rock Campus
Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National
Endowment for the Arts. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award, and
his second book, THE NEW TESTAMENT,
is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. Poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in journals and anthologies including, Callaloo, The
Nation, The New Yorker, Oxford American, The New Republic,
100 Best African American Poems, Ascent of Angles, and The
Best American Poetry. Brown is currently an Assistant Professor at Emory
University.
Brown strives to be clear—not
obvious. He is neither afraid of nor married to difficulty or accessibility. He
means to write poems that are felt before they are understood. He thinks
of writing, first, as a process of listening to some series of sounds that
enter his mind and, second, as a process of embodying those sounds.
Because he's so interested in both music and voice, he finds himself
trying to figure the personality of the sounds as he is composing.
