Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim is the Distinguished Professor of Multidisciplinary Letters at Emerson College, where he is also the Elma Lewis Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice. He has also been a scholar-in-residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an editor and columnist at the Washington Post, and editor-in-chief of the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine, founded by W.E.B. DuBois in 1910.

A Guggenheim Fellow and winner of a Pushcart Prize, Asim is the author of 14 books for children and eight books for adults, including Yonder (New York Times Notable Book, ALA Black Caucus Honor Book); The N Word (Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist), We Can’t Breathe (PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay finalist); and Preaching to the Chickens (New York Times Best Illustrated Book Award, ALA Notable Children’s Book, Golden Kite Award).

In addition to his poetry collection, Stop and Frisk, his poems have been published in numerous anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art; Beyond The Frontier: African-American Poetry for the 21st Century; From the Black Arts Movement to Furious Flower: A Collection of Contemporary African American Poetry; Best American Poetry 2021; The Pushcart Prize XLVI: Best of the Small Presses 2022; and This Is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets.

His essays have appeared in Best American Essays, Step into A World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature; Our Boston: Writers Celebrate the City They Love, The New Republic, and elsewhere.