Jericho Brown's first collection of poetry, Please, won the 2009 American Book Award. Brown is the recipient of a fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Whiting Writer's Award. He has also received two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. His poems appear in magazines including, The American Poetry Review, The Believer, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Tin House, and 100 Best African American Poems. Jericho Brown grew up in Louisiana and worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and a B.A. from Dillard University. He teaches Creative Writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego and is currently working on his second collection of poetry, The New Testament.