Brenda Marie Osbey is an author
of poetry and of prose nonfiction in English and in French. Recent work appears in Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing; Poet Lore; Planète
Ovale; Southern Literary Journal; and Atlantic Studies: Literary, Historical and Cultural Perspectives. From 2005 to 2007, she served as the
first peer-selected poet laureate of Louisiana.
Osbey is the author of
All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press) now in its third printing. She is the author
also of Desperate Circumstance,
Dangerous Woman (Story Line Press, 1991), In These Houses (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) and Ceremony for Minneconjoux (Callaloo Poetry Series, 1983; University Press of Virginia, 1985).
Her poems have appeared
in numerous journals, anthologies and collections including: Callaloo, Obsidian, Essence, Southern
Exposure, Southern Review, Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern
Poetry, 2PLUS2: A Collection of International Writing, Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, Epoch, The American
Voice, and The American Poetry Review.
Studies of her work appear in such reference works as Contemporary Authors, the Oxford Companion to African American Literature and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Oxford, 1997), as well as such critical texts as Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women by Lynn Keller
(U. Chicago Press, 1997) and The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (Oxford, 1996).
Her work has been the subject also of such literary conferences as the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL)
and the Modern Language Association (MLA), as well as masters and doctoral theses and dissertations.
Her essays
on New Orleans appear in The American Voice,
Georgia Review, BrightLeaf and Creative Nonfiction. Her column on race and culture in contemporary France was published in Gambit Weekly.
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For nearly twenty years she has researched and recorded the history of the Faubourg Tremé, a community founded by free Blacks in New Orleans. She served
as a consultant and commentator on New Orleans Black culture and history for Faubourg Tremé: the Untold
Story of Black New Orleans (Serendipity
Films, 2007) and Claiming Open Spaces (Urban Garden Films/ PBS, 1996).
Osbey is the recipient of fellowships and awards, including: the 2008-09
Louisiana Board of Regents Award to Artists and Scholars (ATLAS); the 2008 Manship Summer Research Fellowship; the Camargo
Foundation Fellowship (Cassis, France 2004); Louisiana Division
of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1993); New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation Maxi-Grant (1993); National Endowment
for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship (1990); Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Poetry Award (1984); the Academy
of American Poets Loring-Williams Prize (1980).
She has been a fellow
of the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Virginia Center
for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University.
Osbey has taught at the
University of California at Los Angeles and Loyola University. She has twice been appointed Visiting Writer-in-residence
at Tulane University and Scholar-in-residence at Southern University; has conducted seminars and colloquia in literature,
creative writing and New Orleans Black Culture at Dillard University. She currently teaches at Louisiana State University.
Brenda Marie Osbey
is a native of New Orleans.
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