Brenda Marie Osbey

Discipline: Poetry

Based In: New Orleans, LA

Year at Millay: 1987

Awards/Honors: Award Winner, Langston Hughes Award, City College of New York, New York, NY (2014); Poet Laureate, Louisiana State Poets Laureate, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, New Orleans, LA (2005–2007); Artist-in-Residence, Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France (2004); Award Winner, American Book Awards, Before Columbus Foundation, Oakland, CA (1998); Grant Recipient, Creative Writing Fellowship Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC (1990); Fellow, MacDowell, Peterborough, NH (1984).

Website: https://www.osbeynola.com/

Brenda Marie Osbey is a poet and essayist working in English and French. She is the recipient of the American Book Award for All Saints: New and Selected Poems, and the Langston Hughes Award for History and Other Poems.

She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Louisiana Division of the Arts, and has been resident fellow of MacDowell; Millay; Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; Bunting Institute of Harvard-Radcliffe; Camargo Foundation at Cassis, France; Dora Maar House at Ménerbes, France; and was 2018 Virginia Humanities Emilia Galli Struppa Fellow, and 2021–2022 Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow.

Poet Laureate Emerita of Louisiana, she was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, and is editor of Gabriel Okara: Collected Poems (African Poetry Book Series). Studies of her work include the volume Summoning Our Saints: the Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey by John Wharton Lowe.