Judge: Jericho Brown

• DEADLINE: April 9th!
• PRIZE: $500 and publication in Phoebe 45.2 (online issue)
• ENTRY FEE: $10
• SUBMISSION SIZE: 3 to 5 poems per submission, totaling no more than 10 pages.

Jericho Brown grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated with a BA from Dillard University in 1998.

Brown is the author of two books of poetry. His most recent collection, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), was described by Yusef Komunyakaa as a chronicle of “life and death, personal rituals and blasphemies, race and nation, the good and the bad” that illuminates “scenarios of self-interrogation and near redemption.” His first collection of poetry, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the 2009 American Book Award. The collection has received tremendous praise since its release; Ilya Kaminsky notes: “His lyrics are memorable, muscular, majestic. His voice in these lines is alive—something that is quite rare in his generation of very bookish and very ironic poetics. Brown’s poems are living on the page, and they give the reader that much: a sense of having been alive fully, if only for a duration of 75 pages of this volume. Indeed, Jericho Brown’s first book is one of those rare things: a debut of a master poet.”

Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe a at Harvard University.