Award-winning poet Jericho Brown will read from his recent collection of poetry The New Testament, one of Library Journal’s  best books of the year and an NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work—Poetry, at Arcadia University on Feb. 11. The event is free and open to the public and will take place at 7 p.m. in Grey Towers Castle. A book signing will follow the reading.

Brown’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry. His first collection of poetry, Please, won the 2009 American Book Award. An NPR review of The New Testament said, “What’s most remarkable in these poems is that, while they never stop speaking through gritted teeth, they are always beautiful, full of a music that is a cross between the sinuous sentences of Carl Phillips, the forceful descriptions of Mark Doty, and hip rhythms of Terrance Hayes.”

An Assistant Professor at Emory University, Brown is a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Tom Gunn Award, and Hurston Wright Poetry Prize. Brown earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University. Brown lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

This event is co-sponsored by the Office of Institutional Diversity, Department of English, Arcadia’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, Graduate Colloquium Fund, Pan African Studies Collective, the Arcadia University Alumni Association, and a donation by a grateful graduate of the Master of Arts in English program. For more information, contact event organizer, Dr. Kalenda Eaton, associate professor of English and director of Global Learning at Arcadia, at eatonk@arcadia.edu.