Jericho Brown grew up in Shreveport, LA. On both sides of Brown's family, he’s the grandson of sharecroppers who fled rural parts of the South in fear of white terror. He grew up landscaping for his father’s “yard business” and spent the winter months at the Morningside Branch public library where he fell in love with poetry. He now believes the work he did in the heat prepared him for the work he'd have to do as a reader, understanding labor as a property of beauty.

He attended the HBCU Dillard University for his BA in English before becoming the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans. He wanted to be surprised by what he wrote, so he turned to poetry, getting an MFA from the University of New Orleans. In order to fully immerse himself, he left New Orleans for the University of Houston where got a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing and finished his first book, Please, which went on to win the American Book Award. Today, he is an associate professor at Emory University, the recipient of a Whiting Award, and of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. His third collection is The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019). Brown's poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.