Award-winning poet Jericho Brown will read from a selection of his work and engage in a Q & A. In awarding his book Tradition the Pulitzer Prize, the prize board described Brown’s work as a “collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.” This event is free, but tickets are required.
BOOKS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE:Books by the featured authors are available now at the Illini Union Bookstore—look for the Festival of Writers display in store or visit their special dedicated web page!
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.
Part of A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois. Supported by the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities.