Jericho Brown

About Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2020 for The Tradition, a collection that invented a new poetic form called "the duplex." A professor at Emory University, Brown writes about race, sexuality, violence, and beauty with a formal precision that makes every word feel inevitable. His work insists that Black queer life is worthy of the highest artistry.

Literary Elements & Structure

Brown is one of the most formally inventive poets writing today. His duplex form combines elements of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues into something entirely new. Even in free verse, his poems are tightly controlled — every line break, every sound, every image is deliberate. He uses received forms (sonnets, odes) and transforms them, and his work is rich with internal rhyme, assonance, and consonance. His poems often turn on a single devastating image or statement — a volta that reframes everything that came before.

Themes

• Race & Violence — Brown confronts anti-Black violence with unflinching clarity, naming both systemic and intimate harm.
• Desire & Sexuality — His poems explore queer desire with sensuality and specificity, refusing shame.
• Beauty & Tradition — He asks what beauty means in a world that weaponizes it, and what traditions are worth keeping.
• The Body — Physical experience — pleasure, pain, illness — is the ground from which his most powerful poems grow.

If You Match This Artist

If you match Jericho Brown, you care about craft as much as content — you want your poems to be formally beautiful even when they're about ugly truths. You're probably drawn to structure and pattern, and you understand that constraints can actually set creativity free. Your work likely holds contradictions together: tenderness and fury, pleasure and pain, tradition and revolution.

Literary Terms in Their Work

• Volta — Brown's poems pivot sharply, often in the final lines, reframing everything the reader thought they understood.
• Assonance — He weaves vowel sounds through his lines with the precision of a musician, creating an undertow of music beneath the meaning.
• Metaphor — Flowers, gardens, and the natural world become sites of both beauty and violence in his work.
• Meter — Even in free verse, Brown maintains a rhythmic tension that gives his poems a formal gravity.