The Sewanee Review is pleased to announce that Jericho Brown is the recipient of the 2024 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
Jericho Brown is the author of three collections of poetry: The Tradition, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The New Testament, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Please, which won the 2009 American Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill. Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
University Vice Chancellor Dr. Robert Pearigen and Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross will present Brown with the Aiken Taylor Award this November at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. As part of this year’s award celebration, critic and scholar Meta DuEwa Jones will lecture on Brown’s poetry. Jones is the author of The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word. Jones’ creative scholarship and research have been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson, and Mellon foundations, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute.
“A poem,” Jericho Brown tells us, “is a gesture toward home.” We hope you will join us this November to celebrate this poet and his exceptional body of work.