HUSL Today Salutes

James A. Emanuel

James A. Emanuel was born on June 15, 1921 in Alliance, Nebraska.  Emanuel is a published poet, scholar, and critic. As a poet, Emanuel has published more than 300 poems and 13 individual books. Emanuel has been called one of the best, and most overlooked, poets of his time. Critics have put forward several reasons for Emanuel's poetry being neglected by the larger literary world, including the fact that Emanuel writes more traditional poetic forms, that he no longer lives in the United States, and the fact that he refuses to take part in the politically correct world of Black academia. 

Emanuel is also credited with creating a new literary genre, jazz-and-blues haiku, which he has read to musical accompaniment throughout Europe and Africa. For this creation he was awarded the Sidney Bechet Creative Award in 1996. He was also awarded the Dean's Award for Distinguished Achievement in 2007 from Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and has also been honored with a John Hay Whitney Award, a Saxton Memorial Fellowship, and a Special Distinction Award from the Black American Literature Forum.


His books include Jazz from the Haiku King (1999), Whole Grain: Collected Poems, 1958–1989 (1990), The Broken Bowl: New and Uncollected Poems (1983), Black Man Abroad: The Toulouse Poems (1978), and At Bay (1969). He is also the author of Langston Hughes (1967) and the editor, with Theodore L. Gross, of Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968).

You can check out a few of Emanuel's works by clicking here. An expatriate African-American, Emanuel lives in Paris.

HUSL Today Salutes James Emanuel!!!