About
Brenda Marie Osbey is a poet, essayist, editor, and independent librettist working in English and French. Her seven books include her collected poems, All Souls: Essential Poems (LSU Press, 2015); History and Other Poems (Time Being Books, 2012; Langston Hughes Award, 2014); All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997; American Book Award, 1998 ).
Online features of her work include the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers, and World Literature Today.
Osbey has been a resident fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Kentucky Foundation for Women, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony, Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France), Maison Dora Maar (Ménerbes, France), and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University. She has received fellowships and awards also from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. Osbey is the recipient of the 2014 Langston Hughes Award as “Humanist, Artist and Steward of the Langston Hughes Legacy,” and 2018-19 Emilia Galli Struppa Fellow of Virginia Humanities.
Studies of her work include Summoning Our Saints: The Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey by John Wharton Lowe (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2019).
Featured Work
ALL SOULS: Essential Poems by Brenda Marie Osbey
All Souls: Essential Poems brings together work that reflects the interweaving of history, memory, and the indelible bonds between living and dead that has marked the output of Louisiana Poet Laureate Emerita Brenda Marie Osbey. Comprising poems written and published over the span of four decades, this thematic collection highlights the unity of Osbey’s voice and narrative intent.
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Dynamic and unflinching, the poems in All Souls speak of a world with many secrets, known “only through having learned them / the hardest way.”
– from the publisher, LSU Press
