Award-winning poet A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections, most recently The Cineaste, (W.W Norton & Co, 2013), which Terrance Hayes described as “dazzling.”
His other books include Quantum Lyrics, (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (W.W Norton & Co., 2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times, and Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry.
When asked by storySouth about his research into Oscar Micheaux’s life and work for his chapbook, The Homesteader, Jordan responded, “I’m more interested in the cultural materialism around the time and the emotional resonance of a scene. Once I get the facts down, I can hang the emotion on the facts around place and time. The iconography of it all just becomes a restriction, like a form, from which I can then create language.”
Jordan has taught at a number of institutions including, Prince Georges Community College, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, The University of Texas at Austin, where he was tenured as an Associate Professor, Rutgers University-Newark where he served as the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor, and at the University of Michigan, where he currently serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature.
