Brief Bio
Tyehimba Jess was born in Detroit, Michigan, and earned a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from New York University.
Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000-2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship.
He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018.
Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author's Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series and was named one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005" by The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review. A Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, Jess is the recipient of a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2006 Whiting Award in Poetry, a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.
Jess has taught at the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the College of Staten Island in New York City.
Poems - 10 in all
Tyehimba Jess
Mercy
What Marked Tom?
Blind Boone's Vision
Hagar in the Wilderness
martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935
Tyehimba Jess - 2 ~ New ~
Blind Tom plays on.
"leadbelly's lessons"
Charity on Blind Tom
Freedsong: Dream Song
Blind Boone's Pianola Blues
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