Overview
Poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers presents and talks about her poem "Tuscaloosa: Riversong," July 29, 2005, beside the Black Warrior River in Alabama. Jeffers is the author of numerous books of poetry including The Age of Phillis as well as the novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois.
"Tuscaloosa: Riversong" is part of the Poets in Place series, a Research Collaboration in the Humanities initiative funded through Emory University’s Presidential Woodruff Fund, in collaboration with series, a Research Collaboration in the Humanities initiative funded through Emory University’s Presidential Woodruff Fund, in collaboration with the Office of the Provost. Series producers are Natasha Trethewey and Allen Tullos.
Video
Part 2: Jeffers examines the river imagery in section five of "Tuscaloosa: Riversong"
About the Poet
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). Her 2020 collection The Age of Phillis reexamines the life of American poet Phillis Wheatley, based on years of archival research; it was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. Her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was published by HarperCollins in 2021.
Cover Image Attribution
Horton Mill Covered Bridge Over Black Warrior River, February 7, 2021. Photograph by Flickr user Jimmy Emerson, DVM. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Cover Image Attribution:
"Black Warrior River." Moundville, Alabama, August 2010. Photography by Jeffrey Reed. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 3.0.Recommended Resources
Text
Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Gospel of Barbecue. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000.
Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. Outlandish Blues. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Web
The Black Warrior Watershed
http://www.riversofalabama.org/Black%20Warrior/BLACK_WARRIOR.htm.
