Dr. Jericho Brown first learned last week that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry at the very moment that the rest of the world got wind of the exciting news via a virtual announcement.
“I was home of course because everybody’s home, and I actually looked it up because I was trying to see it because I knew that they were announcing it that day,” says Brown, whose book, The Tradition — a collection of poems — had been nominated for the high honor. “The book did get some attention, so I knew it had a chance.”
Brown, who is currently an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University, was elated when they called his name, announcing him as the 2020 winner.
“I’m just happy,” he says in a recent interview with Diverse. “I was excited, and I am still am. This is still brand new to me and it hasn’t fully sunk in.”
The Louisiana native is no stranger to receiving accolades for his poetry. The winner of an American Book Award and Whiting Award, Brown has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts.
But flash back some twenty years ago, and Brown — a graduating senior at Dillard University in New Orleans — was preparing to graduate from the historically Black institution unsure about what he was going to do next.
“I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know how to go about making that happen,” he recalls, adding that Mildred Robertson, a former communications officer at Dillard, helped him land his first job.
