Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Tuscaloosa: Riversong

Poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers presents her poem "Tuscaloosa: Riversong," July 29, 2005, beside the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Jeffers is the author of The Gospel of Barbecue (2000) and Outlandish Blues (2003). Recommended Resources features videos in which Jeffers talks about the writing of "Tuscaloosa: Riversong" and examines the river imagery.

An Alabama native, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State University, 2000), which won the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry and was the finalist for the 2001 Paterson Poetry, and Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Jeffers also has won the 2002 Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry and awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Black Issues Book Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Crown, 2001), Callaloo, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Warner/Aspect, 2000), Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (Third World, 2002), and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (Sarabande 2002). She is completing a third book of poetry and her first book of collected fiction.