Jericho Brown is an award-winning poet and creator of the “Duplex” form. Composed of seven couplets, this contemporary poetic form is described by Brown as a “gutted sonnet,” simultaneously part ghazal and part blues poem. It is featured in his collection The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2020.
Brown’s poetry has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. Among the most celebrated literary figures of his generation, he has received the Whiting Award, the American Book Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize among others. In 2024 Brown was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and won a coveted “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.
Early Life and Career
Brown was born Nelson Demery III in 1976 and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana. He grew up in a religious family; his father, Nelson Demery Jr., was a landscaper and deacon at Mount Canaan Missionary Baptist Church, and his mother, Neomia, was a schoolteacher. Brown states, “I grew up loving music and going to church and reading poetry and believing that all three were necessary and Black.”
Brown has often recalled the difficulties of his early life, sharing what corrosive forces shaped who he thought he should be as a young man and how they later influenced his poetic subject matter. He credits his transfer to a magnet school—after five elementary schools and two middle schools—as a turning point, after which he increasingly turned to poetry as a vehicle for life-saving self-expression. In his own words, “I really didn’t understand that my life could have meaning. Poetry gave me something to do to stave off death.”
Brown received a BA from Dillard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. He then worked as a speechwriter for New Orleans mayor Marc Morial before completing a PhD in Literature at the University of Houston. Brown describes his decision to quit his job at in his mid-twenties to attend graduate school as another crossroads moment, one that led him to take a new name and take full responsibility for his life. “I remember thinking of it as an opportunity to completely reinvent myself,” he later recalled. “That summer before I went off to school, I changed my name to Jericho Brown.”
Works
Brown’s poetry explores the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Though it invites readers to consider these intersections, his poetry begins not with political intention but with poetic observations of everyday experiences. Brown describes his interest in a poetry that faces “the political moment that is part of [our] lives,” in “a poem that is like the life we live.”
Brown’s debut collection, Please (2008), conveys the poet’s fierce arrival—to paraphrase Robert Reid-Pharr—as a Black, gay, and southern poet with something to say. Throughout Please, the poet narrates and negotiates his own becoming, at age twenty-six, “Jericho Brown.” Readers arrive at the collection’s final poem, “Because My Name is Jericho,” with a speaker on the mend:
Maybe some of us are
Better broken into—we mend easy
As a ripped shirt or
A damaged wall
Please uses the structural conceit of a mixtape track list, and patterns broken and reimagined infuse its pages. Every track in Please reminds, as Mark Doty writes, “how tenderness and harm are so close together.”
His elegiac second collection, The New Testament (2014), is dedicated to the memory of Messiah Demery, Brown’s cousin, who was shot to death in 2008. Brown stated that he “always wanted to write a book about Black men,” and in the pages of The New Testament, Brown pays tribute to men like Demery (“Found: Messiah”), friend Previn Keith Butler (“What the Holy Do”), poet Dwayne Betts (“Hustle”), and an unnamed “favorite professor.” Throughout, he utilizes a mythic motif, brother-as-metaphor, as a narrative elegiac device (“Make-Believe”). Additionally, four of the collection’s poems bear the title “Another Elegy”; in the first, readers are told to “Expect death. In every line.”
With The New Testament, Brown places stronger emphasis on a Black queer literary genealogy. Whereas Please referenced Black musical artists and concluded with “liner notes,” The New Testament begins with a James Baldwin epigraph and includes poems that engage the work of Langston Hughes and other prominent Black authors. The New Testament is more mythic and monumental yet simultaneously looser in structure but no less intimate than Brown’s debut. With his second collection, Brown becomes aware that “nothing we erect is our own,” including the words we build and share. All that we create is bigger than the creator, both a powerful rumination on the creative process and reflection on the faith traditions of Brown’s childhood from which he was first encouraged to write.
Brown describes his third collection, The Tradition (2019), as “a representation of myself, but the better me, the bigger me.” After his first two works, The Tradition finds a poet in full bloom as he works with existing and new forms to examine cycles of violence and terror, love and loss.The collection continues Brown’s meditative lyricism and features recognized forms (the title sonnet, for example) as well as a form of Brown’s own invention: the duplex. The duplex takes elements from the sonnet, the ghazal, and the Blues to produce a form that Brown describes as “Black and queer and southern.” As the term “duplex” suggests, Brown understands that his new structure must always share room with another occupant, perhaps known and unknown, on the other side of the shared wall. Citing his reading of contemporary Natasha Trethewey’s work, Brown states, “I’m here, I’m in both of your traditions. What are you gonna do with me?”
As a form, Brown’s duplex ends where it begins: the last line roughly identical to the first, evoking a circularity that links the past to the present in a new tradition. In this way, his creation reflects something of his personal trajectory: he knew that to become a poet he would have to leave behind the expectations imposed on Nelson Demery III of Shreveport, Louisiana. With The Tradition, Brown established a tradition all his own, creating a structure in the duplex capable of representing every aspect of the poet named “Jericho Brown.”
Brown’s latest work includes an edited collection on Black writing, How We Do It (2023) and an edited collection of work from the poet Reginald Shepherd, The Selected Shepherd (2024). Shepherd once wrote that the aim of his poetry was both “to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning, including always myself” and to “never to forget beauty, however strange or difficult.” Like Shepherd, Brown’s life-affirming, self-fashioning, and rescuing books lyricize the often strange and difficult beauty of our lives.
