ATLANTA — A poet from Atlanta just won one of the most important literary awards in the world.
Jericho Brown, director of Emory College’s nationally renowned Creative Writing Program, was announced as the 2020 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
It was Brown poem’s “The Tradition,” that won over the judges. The poem is a meditation on life during a time of mass shootings and police violence.
Judges called it, “A collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.”
[FULL LIST: Winners of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize]
The 44-year-old told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he started crying the moment he learned he had won.
“I was screaming and crying. I was like, ‘Oh, this is how you act, Jericho,’” Brown said. “I am very happy. I am just glad for whatever attention this brings to the book and the people who need the book the most.”
Brown’s poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Best American Poetry.
His first book, Please, won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament, 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.
His third collection of poetry, The Tradition, was published in April 2019 and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry.
The coveted award puts Brown in the company of literary luminaries such as poets Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Mary Oliver, Rita Dove, Sylvia Plath, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Frost, and ensures his work as part of the canon of American literature.
“I have known about the Pulitzer Prize and understood its prestige since I was in elementary school and Rita Dove won it,” Brown said in a news release. “And I’m so glad I understood it as one of the possibilities for a writer even when I was a kid.
“Understanding it as a possibility doesn’t mean I ever expected to win it, and getting the news that I won is the very best thing to happen to me in 2020 by far,” he adds. “I didn’t expect to win it because when I write my poems I mean to be as subversive and radical as possible.”
Brown grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated with a BA from Dillard University in 1998.
Information from the Associated Press and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was used in this report
© 2020 Cox Media Group
