D.S. Marriott

Poet and scholar D.S. Marriott was born in Nottingham and educated at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the poetry collections Incognegro (Salt, 2006), Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008), The Bloods (Shearsman, 2011), and Duppies (Commune Editions, 2019). His chapbooks include In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). In his critical and creative work, Marriott, of Jamaican heritage, draws on postcolonial thought and thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and is the leading theorist of Afro-pessimism. His critical books include On Black Men (Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press, 2000), Letters to Langston (Rutgers University Press, 2006), and Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018).

Of Marriott’s “exilic speech” in poems that braid together historical, personal, theological, and philosophical registers, John Wilkinson notes, “Post-colonialism is not only an academic specialty, but gives an academic name to a stance that entails continuous, strenuous and painful negotiation socially and psychologically. Marriott is British by birth and education although living in California, and also he is black British; he is an exile at least twice over. It is because misprision is the basic condition of such a life that his writing must adhere to the conditions of civic discourse in English … this is poetry to be followed into the folds of painful experience, not contemplated as an aestheticized object.”

Marriott currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.