Brenda Marie Osbey

Brenda Marie Osbey. Courtesy Time Being Books.

Brenda Marie Osbey (born December 12, 1957) is an African-American poet and academic.

Life

Youth and education

Osbey was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.

She graduated from Dillard University, from Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, and from the University of Kentucky with an M.A.

Career

Osbey has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, Loyola University New Orleans, Dillard University, and the University of Louisiana. She has been distinguished visiting professor of Africana studies at Brown University, visiting writer-in-residence at Tulane University and scholar-in-residence at Southern University. She teaches at Louisiana State University.

She has been a resident fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Camargo Foundation and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

Her poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, American Voice, Callaloo, Epoch, Greenfield Review, Indiana Review, Obsidian, Southern Review, and Women's Review of Books. Her essays have been published in The American Voice, Georgia Review, BrightLeaf, Southern Literary Journal, and Creative Nonfiction.

Studies of her work appear in such critical texts as Southscapes: Geographies of race, region and literature by Thadious M. Davis (University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Forms of Expansion: Recent long poems by women by Lynn Keller (University of Chicago Press, 1997); The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (Oxford, 1996); and notices in such reference works as Contemporary Authors; the Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997); the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Oxford, 1997); and Dictionnaire des Créatrices (Éditions des Femmes, 2011).

Recognition

In 2005–2007, she served as the 1st peer-selected poet laureate of Louisiana.

Awards

• 2014 Langston Hughes Society Award
• 2004 Carmargo Foundation Fellow
• 1998 American Book Award for All Saints: New and selected poems
• 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship
• 1984 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Poetry Award
• 1980 Loring-Williams Prize, Academy of American Poets

Publications

Poetry

• Ceremony for Minneconjoux: Poems. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1983; Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1983. ISBN 978-0-912759-03-6
• In These Houses. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-8195-2146-0
• Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman. Brownsville, OR: Three Oaks Farm, 1991. ISBN 978-0-934257-57-2
• All Saints: New and selected poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-8071-2198-6
• History, and other poems. St. Louis, MO: Time Being Books, 2013.
• All Souls: Essential poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2015.

Edited

• Gabriel Okara, Collected Poems. University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Anthologized

• Marge Piercy, ed (1987). Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now. Pandora. ISBN 978-0-86358-108-3. 
• Leon Stokesbury, ed (1999). The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-55728-579-9. http://books.google.com/books?id=m1e7kg3uM7EC&pg=PA239&lpg=PA239&dq=Brenda+Marie+Osbey&source=bl&ots=9X_P59mH2q&sig=6ATdVaReeLZ8APfVWV12hyZ7uAM&hl=en&ei=8ZEOS82pHsrklAf2-6ycBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CBYQ6AEwBjgU#v=onepage&q=Brenda%20Marie%20Osbey&f=false. 
• 2PLUS2: A collection of international writing (edited by James Gill) Lausanne, Switzerland: Mylabris Press, 1987.
• Literature of the American South: A Norton anthology (edited by William L. Andrews). New York: Norton, 1997. ISBN 978-0-393-97270-2
• Frederick Smock, ed (1998). "The Evening News". The American voice anthology of poetry. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-0956-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=apuYt5b3oGMC&pg=PA78&dq=Brenda+Marie+Osbey#v=onepage&q=Brenda%20Marie%20Osbey&f=false. 

Osbey reads her commemorative poem

• Charles H. Rowell, ed (2002). "Setting Loose the Icons". Making Callaloo: 25 years of Black literature. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-28898-3. 

See also

• African-American poets
• List of U.S. poets

Preceded by Jean Boese

Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2005-2007

Succeeded by Darrell Bourque

External links

Poems

• Brenda Marie Osbey poem ("On Contemplating the Breasts of Pauline Lumumba") at the Academy of American Poets
• from "Qu'on arrive enfin"
• "Litany of Our Lady," Poetry Society of America
• "Death by Water Suite," World Literature Today

Books

• Brenda Marie Osbey at Amazon.com

About

• Brenda Marie Osbey at Time Being Books
• Brenda Marie Osbey at Poets & Writers
• Brenda Marie Osbey at Brown University
• "Author's website"
• Brenda Marie Osbey at Internet Movie Database
• "Louisiana's Poet Laureate: What Was Lost" interview, NPR

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