Tyehimba Jess

Early life

Tyehimba Jess was born Jesse S. Goodwin. He grew up in Detroit, where his father worked in that city's Department of Health. His father later became the first vice president of Detroit's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Jess's mother was a teacher and nurse, who founded a nursing school at Wayne County Community College in 1972.

According to Jess, he started writing poetry at age 16. Within just a few years, when he was 18, he had won second prize for poetry at an NAACP academic competition. He graduated from high school in 1984. Next, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he intended to be an English major and pursue his poetry writing. However, he soon abandoned this as an option, and dropped out of the university in 1987. During this time, to support himself, Jess worked as an intern at a bank, as a community organizer, and as substitute teacher in the public school system in Chicago.

In 1989, he returned to the University of Chicago (UC), and by this time had switched his major to Public Policy. But Jess says that after he began to take classes at UC with the poet and scholar Sterling Plumpp, who became a mentor, he realized that his real passion was for poetry. Plumpp's classes focused on literary figures from the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s. And although he was just a few credits shy of a degree in Public Policy, Jess felt inspired enough to again switch back to poetry. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1991, with a BA degree in Public Policy. He later pursued a MFA degree at New York University which he received in 2004.

Career

As of 2017, Jess teaches poetry and fiction at CUNY College of Staten Island and is the faculty adviser for Caesura, the university's literary arts magazine.

Jess's first book of poetry, leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005), was chosen by Brigit Pegeen Kelly as a winner in the 2004 National Poetry Series competition. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005".

In April 2016, Jess released his second full-length poetry collection, titled Olio. This work has been described as "part fact, part fiction….sonnet, song and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded AfricanAmerican 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.

Inspiration

Jess' inspiration for writing stems from his drive to express history through expression and performance.

"In Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, a new book length performance of poetry, song, collage and art object, musical knowledge is channeled back to its source—before the wax cylinders of antiquated recording technology, before Alan Lomax and W.C. Handy, to the 19th century of black musicians. Jess’s poetic concentration is so absolute, dithyrambic, multimodal, encyclopedic, that it defies categorization as much as the early music of gospel singers and jazz pioneers, blues artists and vaudeville performers he describes and celebrates. History as song; as expression; as freedom. That is, a living history that follows the great migration of African-Americans between the Civil War and World War I who undertook journeys across thousands of miles as well as musical history. The result is one of the most profound portraits I know of how artists have redefined their very being in the world"

"Jess, though an author who has a voice that cannot be mistaken, acts more as a gentle tour guide through a period of black artistry that is often represented differently than it is here"

Poetry

Anthologies

Non-fiction

Awards

Reception

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.

Tyehimba Jess’ latest collection, Olio, does and is so many different things that it distracts you from your preconceived notions about what poetry can be, what it can do, and, ultimately, what you think you know...Olio is and is not like any book you’ve seen before."