
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Jeffers is a major figure in American letters. I met her when she was appointed “Witter Bynner Fellow” at the Library of Congress by US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. It was love at first sight. She is a true southern lady with reverence to the South’s most elegant traditions. At the same time she is a powerful transformer and reformer of its present and past. She changes sorrow into compassion with a huge story at the center of every poem. She is as free as the wind, and cannot be caught by any net. This refreshes our language, making it new. - Grace Cavalieri
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has won fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. She is the author of three books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue, Outlandish Blues, and Red Clay Suite. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She lives on the prairie, where she teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
Draft of an Ex-Colored Letter Sent Home
From the Post-Race War Front
The Glory Gets
for my replacement
Apologia for Something
Memory of a Vision of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo
Queen of New Orleans (1996)
Memory of an Ancestral Vision (2006)
© Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, all rights reserved