Wanda Coleman
The author of 18 books of poetry and prose, she is a recent contributor to HARRIET, a blog (poetryfoundat-ion.org), occasionally contributes to drgodine.blogspot .com, and is featured in Writing Los Angeles (Library of America, 2002), in Poet’s Market (2003), and Quercus Review VI (2006). She has been an Emmy-winning scriptwriter, and a former columnist for Los Angeles Times magazine; a nominee for poet laureate, California 2005 and for the USA artists fellowship 2007. She was a Gaea fellow at the Sea Change Cottage, Province-town, October 2010. Coleman’s books from Black Sparrow Books (Godine) are Bathwater Wine, winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize—the first African-American woman to receive it, and Mercurochrome (poems), bronze-medal finalist, National Book Awards 2001. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She writes fiction as well (A War of Eyes and Other Stories and the novel Mambo Hips and Make Believe). She was C.O.L.A.’s first literary fellow, Dept. of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles, 2003-04. Her most recent books include Ostinato Vamps (Pitt Poetry Series), The Riot Inside Me: Trials & Tremors (nonfiction, Godine/Black Sparrow) and WANDA COLEMAN: Poems Seismic in Scene (de la chienne) - Mise en page et calligraphies/layout and illumination by Jean-Jacques Tachdjian, Lille, France, spring 2006. A second collection of stories, Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales was published in 2008 from Black Sparrow Books (finalist for the Patterson Fiction Prize 2009). The World Falls Away is forthcoming in Fall 2011 (Pitt Poetry Series).