This site contains a brief biography of Knight, a selected bibliography, the text of one of his poems, and a list of links.

BIOGRAPHY
Etheridge Knight (1933-1991) was born in Corinth, Mississippi, attended two years of public high school in Kentucky, and served in the U.S. Army from 1948 to 1951. Convicted on a robbery charge and sentenced in 1960 to twenty years in Indiana State Prison, he discovered poetry; his first collection is entitled Poems from Prison (1968). Knight was paroled after eight years.

From 1968 to 1971 he was poet-in-residence at several universities. An important African American voice in the 1960s and 1970s, Knight rejected the American and European esthetic tradition, arguing that "the red of this esthetic rose got its color from the blood of black slaves, exterminated Indians, napalmed Vietnamese children." His collection Belly Song and Other Poems was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. His awards include National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim grants, and the 1987 American Book Award for The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986).