Arlene Keizer's Poems for Beauford Delaney

Arlene Keizer, an Afro-Caribbean American poet and scholar, writes about the literature, lived experience, theory, and visual culture of the African Diaspora. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, she later earned an MA in English and Creative Writing (Poetry) at Stanford University and a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (Cornell UP), and her poems and articles have appeared in African American Review, American Literature, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, PMLA, Poem-a-Day, TriQuarterly, and other venues. Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black, her collection of poems about the African American painter Beauford Delaney, won the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in 2023 by the Kent State University Press. She is a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Links:

Arlene Keizer

Arlene Keizer’s page at Pratt Institute

Interview with Arlene Keizer at Speaking of Marvels

“Canopy” in Poem-A-Day

Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black at Kent State University Press

Beauford Delaney

Bio and artwork at Knoxville Museum of Art

Bio and Artwork at the Smithsonian

Bio and artwork at Studio Museum in Harlem

Artwork at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery