Jericho Brown on Where Love and Violence Intersect

“I keep trying to talk to the guy in me that wants to blow stuff up. Which is normal by the way— Baldwin said that to be conscious is to be rageful. I’m not as ashamed anymore about the past, because I understand I was being a whole and complete person.”

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition ), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.