Brenda Marie Osbey

, award winning poet and former poet laureate of the state of Louisiana, will deliver the 2016 James A. Gray Lecture at Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) on Wednesday, March 30, 2016 at 3:30pm in the Diggs Gallery.

Osbey will engage in a public conversation on “An Ethics of History and Memory” and read from her latest book All Souls: Essential Poems published by Louisiana State University press.

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Brenda Marie Osbey is an author of poetry and prose nonfiction in English and French. Her books include her collected poems, All Souls: Essential Poems (LSU Press, 2015); History and Other Poems (Time Being Books, 2013); All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997), which received the 1998 American Book Award; Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (Story Line Press, 1991); In These Houses (Wesleyan University Press, 1988); and Ceremony for Minneconjoux (Callaloo Poetry Series, 1983; University Press of Virginia, 1985).
Her poems have been published in numerous journals, anthologies and collections including Callaloo; Obsidian; Essence; Southern Review; Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now;The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry; 2PLUS2: A Collection of International Writing; Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology; Epoch; The American Voice; Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing; Southern Literary Journal; Atlantic Studies: Literary, Historical and Cultural Perspectives; Poet Lore; Renaissance Noire and The American Poetry Review. Her essays have appeared in The American Voice; The Georgia Review; BrightLeaf; Mondes Francophones; Southern Literary Journal; Creative Nonfiction and Renaissance Noire. She has edited poetry features for Indiana Review, Poet Lore and War|Scapes. Forthcoming in 2016 is Gabriel Okara: Collected Poems, Edited and with an Introduction by Brenda Marie Osbey (African Poetry Book Series).
For more than twenty-five years she has researched and recorded the history of the Faubourg Tremé, a community founded by free Blacks in New Orleans. Her series, “Faubourg Tremé: Community in Transition,” was published as a regular feature in the New Orleans Tribune (1990–97). She was research consultant for Faubourg Tremé: the Untold Story of Black New Orleans (Serendipity Films, 2007), and appears as commentator on New Orleans Black culture and history in that film and in Claiming Open Spaces (Urban Garden Films/ PBS, 1996). “Notes from France,” her series on race relations in contemporary France was a featured column in Gambit Weekly (2004). “Les Indigènes sont agités: la Nouvelle-Orléans à la Suite de l’Orage,” (“The Natives Are Restless: New Orleans in the Wake of the Storm”), an essay in response to the floods of 2005, was jointly commissioned by the Plaine Commune District of France and the Consulat Général de la Nouvelle-Orléans, and published by Médiathèques de Plaine Commune in 2007.
Studies of her work appear in such critical texts as Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region and Literature by Thadious M. Davis (University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women by Lynn Keller (U. Chicago Press, 1997); The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (Oxford, 1996); and such reference works as Contemporary Authors; the Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997); the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Oxford, 1997); and Dictionnaire des Créatrices (Éditions des Femmes, 2011). Her work has been the subject of panels at conferences of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL), Modern Language Association (MLA), Furious Flower African American Poetry Conference, as well as masters and doctoral theses and dissertations. A public television short feature on her work, entitled “Native Daughter” aired in 1999, and an independent film of Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman has been undertaken by Urban Garden Films. Summoning Our Saints: Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey, edited by John W. Lowe is forthcoming from LSU Press.
In spring 2005, Osbey was named the first peer-selected Poet Laureate of the State of Louisiana. During her two-year tenure of service, she toured the United States presenting weekly poetry readings, lectures and symposia advocating the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region of the United States in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
She has been a resident fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Camargo Foundation, Maison Dora Maar, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, and is the recipient of the 2014 Langston Hughes Award. A native of New Orleans, Osbey is Poet Laureate Emerita of Louisiana, and has served since 2011 as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.
Supported by the James A. Gray Endowment established in 1952, the James A. Gray Lectures annually brings outstanding scholars and exemplary faith leaders to the campus of Winston-Salem State University to engage some of the most pressing issues in public life.
The event is free and open to the public