Love is a Dangerous Word

Essex Hemphill (1957–1995) was born in Chicago and raised in Washington, DC. He was a member of the poetry collective Cinque, a frequent collaborator with the Emmy award-winning filmmaker Marlon Riggs, and the editor of the Lambda Literary Award winning anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991). Hemphill received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. His collection Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992) won the National Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. John Keene is the author of Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions. His most recent book, Punks: New & Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Robert F. Reid-Pharr is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and the author of Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique; Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual; Black Gay Man: Essays; and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American.

"When I read a poet like Essex Hemphill, my heart just comes up in my mouth and does an African folk-dance on the back of my throat….He's making something that has never been made or said before. He gives me hope and strength."