Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess (born Detroit) is an American poet.

He graduated from the University of Chicago, and New York University, with an MFA. He teaches poetry and fiction at CUNY College of Staten Island and is the faculty adviser for Caesura, the university's literary arts magazine.

In April 2016 Tyehimba Jess released OLIO, “part fact, part fiction….sonnet, song and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers….” In his book he writes some poems in reference to Edmonia Lewis, John William Boone, Henry Box Brown, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ernest Hogan, Sissieretta Jones, Scott Joplin, Millie and Christine McKoy, Booker T. Washington, Blind Tom Wiggins, Bert Williams and George Walker.

His work appeared in Soul Fires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Tyehimba Jess ... coaxes an astonishingly rich world from the wood and steel scraps of the life he finds before him. He chronicles the story of Leadbelly — the killer, the lover, the victim, the son, the greatest bluesman of his time—and he has the chops to animate this complex man.

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