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Readings | Interview with Natasha Trethewey | Recommended Resources and Selected Writings

In this interview, conducted on September 5, 2009, during the Decatur (Georgia) Book Festival, Jericho Brown talks with Natasha Trethewey about learning to love his hometown, gay black identity, the visibility of southern poets, and autobiography in poetry.

	Part 1 (8:06 min.) Topics: • Difficulties of claiming Shreveport, Louisiana, as home. • What Brown learned from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." • The influence of Louisiana poets. Brown's insistence on being a southern writer. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime
	Part 2 (9:19 min.) Topics: • The place of region in writing. • Talk of Nikky Finney's anthology The Ringing Ear leads to a discussion of who reads black writers. • Alice Walker's awareness of North and South in her early books. • Visibility of black southern poets such as Honoree Jeffers and Terrance Hayes. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime
	Part 3 (1:39 min.) Topics: • Writing against the New Critics. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime
	Part 4 (6:00 min.) Topics: • Working and hanging out in New Orleans. The city's effects on his poetry. • The richness of poetry and music in New Orleans. The Maple Leaf scene. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime
	Part 5 (11:14 min.) Topics: • Negotiating gay, black, southern identity. • Jericho Brown and Nelson Demery III. • The space created by Brown's renaming himself. • The responsibility of writing for readers yet unborn. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime
	Part 6 (4:43 min.) Topics: • Ethics of writing about living people and life experiences. • Poetry as enduring art. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime

Jericho Brown's first book, Please, was published by New Issues in Poetry and Prose in 2008. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Iowa Review, Oxford American, and New England Review, and his honors include fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. Brown is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.

"Natasha Trethewey Interviews Jericho Brown" is part of the Poets in Place series, a Research Collaboration in the Humanities initiative funded through Emory University's Presidential Woodruff Fund, in collaboration with the Office of the Provost. Series producers are Natasha Trethewey and Allen Tullos.

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Readings | Interview with Natasha Trethewey | Recommended Resources and Selected Writings

Published: 28 September 2009

© 2009 Jericho Brown and Southern Spaces