Jabari Asim

Author and cultural critic Jabari Asim was born and raised in St. Louis. He earned a BA at Northwestern University. His writing engages themes of racism, social justice, and current events. “By the time of Mike Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer, I had already begun scribbling lines and addressing the idea of ‘The Talk’ that many African American parents give to their sons when they reach adolescence,” Asim said in a 2014 statement on the Emerson College website, on the publication of his poem “The Talk” in the Washington Post. “I consider the poem in the tradition of Langston Hughes’s ‘Mother to Son,’ and Dudley Randall’s ‘Ballad of Birmingham.’”
 
His work has been anthologized in In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers (1992, edited by Kevin Powell and Ras Baraka), Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (1996, edited by Daniel J. Wideman and Rohan B. Preston), Brown Sugar: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction (2001, edited by Carol Taylor), Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art (2002, edited by Tony Medina, Samiya Bashir, and Quraysh Ali Lansana), and Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin).
 
He is the author of the poetry collection Stop and Frisk (2020); the nonfiction books The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (2008) and What Obama Means … For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future (2009); the story collection A Taste of Honey (2010); the novel Only the Strong (2015); and the children’s books Whose Toes are Those? (2006, chosen as one of the ten best children’s books of the year by Child Magazine, Nick Jr. Magazine, and the Forward) and Fifty Cents and a Dream: Young Booker T. Washington (2012).
 
In the 1980s, he cofounded the literary journal Eyeball and has since served as an editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington Post Book World, and the NAACP’s journal the Crisis. He has taught at Emerson College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
 
His honors include a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a 2001 nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.