Jericho Brown

A Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Jericho Brown is known for poems that address themes of identity, racism, violence, queer sexuality, religious faith, and trauma. His work has been praised for its stark vulnerability and honesty as well as its lyricism and ingenuity. In his breakthrough collection, The Tradition (2019), Brown introduced a new poetic form: the duplex, a melding of the sonnet, ghazal, and blues forms.

Background and influences

Born Nelson Demery III, he grew up in Louisiana in a devout Baptist family. Demery’s parents, Nelson Demery, Jr., and Neomia Demery, ran a dry-cleaning business and a landscaping business, and Nelson Demery III learned about flowers by working with his parents. This knowledge would become a crucial element in “The Tradition,” one of his best poems. Demery’s father was also a church deacon, and Demery has described him as having been physically abusive to his family while at other times tender to and supportive of them.

Growing up, Demery admired the work of a wide range of poets, among them Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds, Langston Hughes, Michael Palmer, T.S. Eliot, Adrienne Rich, and Gwendolyn Brooks. He began writing his own poems at a very young age, encouraged by his mother. Another formative influence was his religious upbringing in an African American church, which he has described as a place where, during services, poems by Black writers such as Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni were read along with passages from the Bible. In 2021 he explained to Mississippi Today, “It put me in contact with the fact that words can have a powerful effect on emotions. That the well said thing could very well lead to shouting and clapping and crying.” Prayer and speaking in front of his congregation also taught him to be comfortable with emotional vulnerability.

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At the same time, as a young gay man, Demery struggled with his family’s and church’s rejection of homosexuality. In 2016 he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I also felt like if they knew who and what I really was, they wouldn’t love me. So there was a judgment, but it was a judgment based on me understanding that this love is indeed conditional.”

Education and name change

Demery frequently changed schools as a child and was often suspended or expelled for fighting with other students and his teachers. By middle school, however, he had started to resolve his behavioral issues. After graduating from high school, Demery attended Dillard University, a historically Black university in New Orleans. He joined a fraternity and majored in English, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1998. In 2002 he received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of New Orleans.

By this time Demery was working as a speechwriter for Marc Morial, the mayor of New Orleans (1994–2002). He had also begun publishing poems in literary journals and was preparing for a doctorate program in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. Already in his poems he was exploring the themes that would distinguish his mature work, including sexuality and family trauma.

However, writing about such topics while using his birth name made Demery uncomfortable, and he wished to carve out a separate identity from his father (whose name he shares). He began publishing under the name Jericho Brown. As he explained to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I felt like I didn’t have this thing that was my own…And I wanted my poems to be mine. Seeing these poems come out with that name [Nelson Demery III] didn’t seem exactly right. It didn’t seem fair to my parents because I knew they wouldn’t want to be associated with that work.”

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Please

In 2007 Brown finished a Ph.D. at the University of Houston. The following year he published his first book, Please, which won an American Book Award. Loosely structured as an album track list, complete with a section titled “Liner Notes,” the collection features many poems about music as well as sexuality, family, and religion. In “Prayer of the Backhanded,” Brown conjures his father and their fraught relationship by using language that is altogether direct, unsettling, and meditative:

God, save the man whose arm
Like an angel’s invisible wing
May fly backward in fury
Whether or not his son stands near.

The New Testament

For his second collection, The New Testament, Brown employed biblical language and imagery to address broader injustices such as mass incarceration. Many of the poems also describe sexual violence and living with HIV. These works sprang from Brown’s own experience of having been raped in his 20s and subsequently discovering that he was HIV-positive. In 2021 he discussed with POZ magazine why he felt it was important to include these topics in his work: “I was able to write about HIV because I thought of it as a responsibility. It becomes my responsibility as a poet to tell the truth, and as long as there’s something I know I’m keeping from the page…then I’m not facing it myself and being honest about it.”

The Tradition

Brown’s first two collections were met with critical praise, but his third book, The Tradition, proved to be a breakthrough for him, with critics noting that his lyrical and technical skills had come into full bloom. The book’s title poem begins with a list of names of flowers (“Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought / Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt”). Drawing on Brown’s heritage as the son of Black landscapers, the piece develops into a protest against police brutality:

Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems

It ends with another list of names, all Black men who were killed by police: “John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”

In 2021 he told told the PBS American Masters: Creative Spark podcast that “their deaths, their murders seemed to me outcomes of a tradition. I sort of sit around thinking, what can I call this poem that nails it down and opens it up at the same time? What can I call this poem that lends itself to the reading of the poem without telling everybody what to read in the poem?” He also described the poem as a “door opener,” adding that “it allowed me to see the possibility of making the other poems that appeared in this book.”

Invention of the duplex form

The Tradition also introduced the duplex, which Brown invented by combining elements of the following forms:

• Sonnet: consists of 14 lines that are typically written in iambic pentameter according to a prescribed rhyme scheme
• Ghazal: consists of rhyming couplets, is generally short and graceful, and typically deals with themes of love
• Blues: consists of a rhyming three-line stanza in which the second line typically repeats the first line

Brown’s duplex poems consist of 14 lines of 7 couplets. The second line of each couplet is echoed in the first line of the next couplet, and the last line of the poem repeats the first line.

In an essay published on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog in 2020, Brown explained the creative impetus behind his new form: “If the presumed content of a sonnet is that it’s a love poem, how do I—a believer in love—subvert that.…Though I may not be, I do feel like a bit of a mutt in the world. I feel like a person who is hard to understand, given our clichés and stereotypes about people. So I wanted a form that in my head was black and queer and Southern.”

Honors

In 2020 The Tradition was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; the Pulitzer committee praised the collection for its “masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.” Other awards and honors Brown has received include a Whiting Award (2009) and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2015) as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (2011), the Guggenheim Foundation (2016), and the MacArthur Foundation (2024).

Other projects and teaching career

Brown served as editor of the books How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill (2023) and The Selected Shepherd (2024), the latter of which is a collection of poems by Reginald Shepherd, who died in 2008. Brown has taught at several universities and in 2012 began teaching at Emory University, where he is director of the school’s creative writing program. In 2024 he was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.