American poet Jericho Brown was BOTD in 1976. Born Nelson Demery III in Shreveport, Louisiana, he studied at Dillard University and the University of New Orleans, before completing a PhD at the University of Houston where he became a teaching fellow in the English department. His first poetry collection, Please, was published in 2008, exploring issues of internalised racism, cultural identity, homophobia and the intersection of love and violence, notably the poem Lunch (“The register takes my jealous / Stare for one of disapproval / And shakes his head at me. / To say, I hate faggots / Too.”) Critically praised, it won the American Book Award. In 2011, he won the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He is best known for his 2019 poetry collection The Tradition, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have also appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. In 2023, he published How We Do It, an anthology of essays and interviews from African-American writers describing their creative process. He is a professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.