PROFILE:
Tyehimba Jess most recently authored the Pulitzer-winning poetry collection, Olio (2016), which weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers from the Civil War up to World War I. His debut collection, leadbelly (2005), which was a National Poetry Series winner, tells the story of Huddie William Ledbetter and his passage to becoming the blues legend, Leadbelly.  These achievements span a career that Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib of The Rumpus called “vital to the archiving of black performance and black performers.”  Howard Rambsy II of Sou’wester recognized Jess’s poetry as “a crossroads of black literary art and musicality,” and praised Jess for “remix[ing] history and legend.”  The Boston Globe called Olio “one of the most inventive, intensive poetic undertakings of the past decade.”

Leading contemporary poetry critic Stephen Burt cited the daring of Jess’s work as well as the breadth of its appeal in recommending Olio as “something people who care for the music, or for African American cultural history, will read and reread, whether or not they notice its ambitious expansions of what has been possible for the contemporary poem.” 

In a Library Journal starred review Barbara Hoffert called Olio “a lightning-strike act of blending historical research and imagination, Jess’s poems range from the post-Civil War era to World War I to vivify mostly undocumented and underappreciated musicians, from the pianist Blind Tom to the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Scott Joplin.” 

If Olio is wide-ranging, it is also, according to Kaveh Akbar of Oxford American, “so relentless in its pursuit of the antebellum realities that remade our country, [that] … we are jolted awake by a hundred alarms, a century’s racket.”  Jacob Sunderlin of Kenyon Review echoed these observations by noting that “the deeper Jess digs into the past the closer he comes to the present.”

Jess’s first collection, leadbelly, earned him praise from Booklist, as “a distinct voice that any lover of blues or student of American history needs.”  Publishers Weekly further considered the way that Jess lent his voice to the history of the blues musician Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter by explaining that “in the telling of one life, a society is exposed—racist, well-meaning, violent, forgiving.”

Tyehimba Jess switched his major at the University of Chicago from Public Policy to English, before earning an MFA at New York University and becoming a fellow at the prestigious Cave Canem community of African American Poets and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. 

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst