Visiting Writers Series: Poet Jericho Brown

This reading, part of UNC Asheville’s Visiting Writers Series, is free and open to everyone at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 14 in Highsmith Student Union, Blue Ridge Room.

Acclaimed poet Jericho Brown won the American Book Award for his first book, Please, and his second book, The New Testament, was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. Brown’s third anthology, published earlier this year, questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater.

“In Brown’s poems, the body at risk — the infected body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros — is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world,” wrote poet Maya Phillips in her review in The New York Times. “But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all: ‘So the Bible says, in the beginning, / Blackness. I am alive.’”

A native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown is the recipient of many prizes and grants, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.

For more information, please contact UNC Asheville’s Department of English, at 828.251.6411 or visit english.unca.edu.

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Accessibility Contact: Highsmith Student Union, highsmithunion@unca.edu or 828.251.6990.

Visitor Parking on the UNC Asheville Campus – Visitors may park in faculty/staff and non-resident lots from 5:00 p.m. until 7:30 a.m., Monday through Friday, and on weekends, holidays, and campus breaks. Visitors are not permitted to park in resident student lots at any time.