LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore is thrilled to present two poets, both UH alums, for a reading from their first books of poetry.

Bradford Gray Telford was educated at Princeton and Columbia and has published work in many journals including the Yale Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Laurel Review, and Bloom. A doctoral candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Telford recently won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for his work on the poetry of Geneviève Huttin. He was also awarded the 2007 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for two poems from his upcoming book, Perfect Hurt.

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving a Ph.D from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, The Iowa Review, jubilat, and New England Review. The recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship, two scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego.

His book Please explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, Please is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African American/male identity and sexuality. Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music. In Please, Jericho Brown sings the influence soul culture has on American life with the accuracy of the blues.