![]() His third collection of poetry, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press), was published in April 2019 and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press 2014), 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 poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Best American Poetry. At the same time, Brown’s work became ever more involved with the issues of racism and racial justice, which are essential in his poetry.Jericho Brown is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a Whiting Writers' Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Arts and USA Artists. In 2002, Brown was also diagnosed with HIV, which he kept secret for years, until poetry helped him to accept it and speak out about it in order to help others also struggling with shame or stigma surrounding this medical condition. Soon after, he adopted the name Jericho Brown. ![]() In 2002, he had a dream in which he responded to someone calling out the name Jericho. He published his early poems under his birth name, but he considered changing it in part to distance himself from his father, Nelson Jr. As Nelson began to accept his homosexuality in his twenties, he became increasingly alienated from both his parents and the Baptist Church to which they belonged. His childhood was marked by his parents’ deep religiosity and his father’s outbursts of domestic violence. He was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1976 to working-class African American parents. Jericho Brown’s birth name was Nelson Demery III. In 2021, he was inducted to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Brown is a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. Several poems have been included in various annual editions of The Best American Poetry. ![]() His poems have appeared in numerous journals and popular magazines, such as The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. In addition to the 2020 Pulitzer Prize he won for The Tradition, he is a recipient of several other prestigious awards, including the American Book Award for his first collection Please (2008), the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his second collection The New testament (2014), the Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and a doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Jericho Brown identifies as a black queer poet, whose work explores his own life at the intersection of marginalized racial and sexual identities, as well as social and cultural circumstances that oppress and endanger these minority groups. This blending of personal concerns and social issues is characteristic of Brown’s poetic voice throughout the collection. ![]() Although it focuses on an individual’s struggle with a disease, the poem also evokes a broader historical struggle against oppression and injustice. ![]() While the virus is not named, some details in the poem and the facts of the poet’s own life make it clear that it is HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which causes AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). Its message is that, while it has been suppressed by medication, it still lurks in the victim’s body, with the intent to harm them, both physically and mentally. In this poem, the virus itself speaks to the person whose body it infects. The poems address the themes of blackness, queerness, legacy, racism, and living with an incurable illness, among others. The Pulitzer jury called it “a collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence” ( 2020 Pulitzer Prizes). It was published in his third poetry collection, The Tradition (2019), which received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “The Virus” is a poem by the American poet Jericho Brown. ![]()
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