Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana and worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University in 1998.

His first collection of poetry, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the 2009 American Book Award. The collection has received tremendous praise since its release, Ilya Kaminsky notes: "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, if only for a duration of 75 pages of this volume. Indeed, Jericho Brown's first book is one of those rare things: a debut of a master poet."

Brown is the recipient of a 2009-2010 Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Whiting Writer's Award. He was a finalist for the 2009 Lambda Literary Award and Paterson Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has also received two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland.

He was a Teaching Fellow in the English Department at the University of Houston from 2002-2007 and a Visiting Professor at San Diego State University's M.F.A. Program in spring 2009. He has also taught at numerous conferences and workshops including the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. He currently teaches Creative Writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.