Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess
Tyehimba Jess’s first book of poetry, leadbelly (Verse Press, 2005), is a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. He won the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000 - 2001, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award. He was on the 2000 and 2001 Chicago Green Mill Slam teams, received a 2005 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-05 Winter Writing Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A proud Cave Canem alumnus, and is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess

Jess's fiction and poetry have appeared in Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (Penguin Books, 1996), Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (Manic D Press, 2000), Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press, 2001), Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century (Black Classic Press, 2002), Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (Third World Press, 2002), and Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones (Aspect Press, 2004). His first non-fiction book, African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions, and Legacy (Citadel Press, 2003), was published in December 2003.

Posted on February 16, 2005 5:44 AM