Jericho Brown, an award-winning poet and a creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
Brown was among 178 scholars, artists and scientists to receive the award this week based on “prior achievement and exceptional promise.” They were selected from nearly 3,000 applicants.
The fellowships come with grants that vary in size and are aimed at giving the recipients time to do research and work. Winning the fellowship will allow Brown to work on a new book entitled “Character,” a collection of poems that will focus on “society’s obsession with celebrity,” according to Emory University.
“It means the world to me that there is some recognition from the outside world, to let Nathasha Tretheway and Walter Kalaidjian know they were right to bring me to Emory University,” Brown told Emory about the former U.S. Poet Laureate who heads the university’s creative writing program and the English Department’s chairman.
Brown’s work has been published in The New Republic, The New Yorker and The Best American Poetry. His first book, “Please,” won a 2009 American Book Award. And his second book, “The New Testament,” won a 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
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