Wanda Coleman—poet, storyteller and journalist—was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Coleman was awarded the prestigious 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine from the American Academy of Poets, becoming the first African-American woman to ever win the prize, and was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome. In 2020, poet Terrance Hayes edited and introduced a selection of her work, Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems, the first new collection of her work since her death in 2013.
The work of Wanda Coleman from Black Sparrow Press. “Wanda Coleman
is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent.”—The Washington
Post
Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems
One of the year’s best— The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and the California Independent Bookseller Alliance
“These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently
hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and
emotion.”—New York Times
“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent
distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive
wit.”—Washington Post
“Wanda Coleman’s peerless Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you
open and heal you where it counts—hateful and hilarious, heartbroke
and hellbent.”—Mary Karr
Required Reading—Bustle
“As a poet, mother, Los Angeles native, black woman, essayist, and
more, Wanda Coleman is a master of honesty. Her writing is an
artifact of a life defined by brilliance, outspokenness, and
survival.”—Slice
Mercurochrome
“Wanda Coleman’s poetry stings, stains, and ultimately helps heal
wounds like the old-fashioned mercurochrome of her title. No easy
remedy for the lacerating American concerns of racism and gender
bias, Coleman’s poetry transforms pain into empathy. . . these
searing, soaring poems challenge us to repair the fractures of
human difference, and feel what it is to be made whole again.”—The
National Book Award Poetry Judges 2001, Stanley Plumly, Chair
Bathwater Wine
“A poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque,
has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast
and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the
too-American rift among races and genders.” —from the jury's
citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Hand Dance
“Coleman’s poems are an act of liberation, meant to be experienced
as something almost physical, like a punch or a whipping . . . she
wants her language to express anger, to incite anger, and to shake
all those who read it out of their complacency.”—The Nation
Imagoes
“Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music . .
.”—Booklist
Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors
“Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective
universalizes her experience and makes her observations both
trenchant and reliable.” —Publisher's Weekly
The Riot Inside Me: More Trial and Tremors
“Coleman is best known for her ‘warrior voice.’ [But her] voice too
can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood’s neighborhoods –
her South L.A.’s wild-frond palms, the smog-smear of pre-ecology
consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie
Holiday’s tours of sorrow’s more desolate stretches. But it can
also land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up
comic.”—Los Angeles Times
War of Eyes
“These are extraordinary stories, told in a powerful voice. This is
the painful reality of the powerlessness that is too often shrouded
in bureaucratic anonymity—a probation number, a welfare case
number. Coleman, with her fine poet’s eye and strong intense
language, brings to life their somber existences.”—Los Angeles
Times Book Review, front page
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