Native in a Strange Land:

Trials & Tremors

Wanda Coleman: winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Shelley Memorial Award!

In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles’ noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and herself. Gleaned from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Coleman says that these pieces offer “a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory.”

We find the author laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men’s magazine while engaged in militant revolutionary politics and witnessing the Watts and Rodney King riots.

While Coleman’s life has been one of unique accomplishment, Publisher’s Weekly notes, “Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.”

Godine, Publisher | Black Sparrow Press is distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand. For more info, click here.

Wanda Coleman—poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist—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 MercurochromeWicked Enchantment: Selected Poems was the first new collection of her work since her death in 2013.

WATCH
+ Six poets came together with Black Sparrow Press to celebrate the publication of Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems. Mahogany L. Browne, Terrance Hayes, Dorothea Lasky, Rachel McKibbens, Patricia Smith, and Amber Tamblyn read from, and discuss, Coleman’s influential work. | Watch

READ
+ Poetry Foundation on Wanda Coleman | Read
+ “Remembering Wanda Coleman” Los Angeles Times | Read
+ Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award | Read
+ “Remembering Wanda Coleman” by Amber Tamblyn | Read
+ Obituary: Wanda Coleman Los Angeles Times | Read

VIEW (Poems from Wicked Enchantment)
+ “I Live for My Car” | Watch
+ “Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead” | Watch
+ “They Came Knocking On My Door at 7 AM” | Watch

LISTEN
+ Wanda Coleman Interviewed (2002) | Listen