User:SafariScribe/Everett Hoagland

Everett H. Hoagland (December 18, 1942) is an American poet, short-story writer, and playwright. He wrote Ten Poems (1968) and Black Velvet (1970), and most of his works has appeared in notable journals and anthologies, including A Broadside Treasury (1971), and Bum Rush the Page (2001). His anthology Here: New and Selected Poems (2002) was ForeWord Magazine's Best Poetry Book in 2002. Hoagland has won many awards and honors for his works such as the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction in 1974 and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Hoagland’s work has spanned using rhythmic jazz, and explores the theme of culture, psychology, and historical racism. While incorporating history and struggle, Hoagland has been praised for his works which earned him the poet laureate of New Bedford in Massachusetts from 1994 to 1998. In literature, he is considered as one of the "finest African-American poets of the late twentieth century and is a central figure in the renaissance of black poetry in the 1990s."

Early life
Hoagland was born on December 18, 1942, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US to Unitarian Universalists Estelle ( neé Johnson) and Everett Hoagland, Jr. He studied in Lincoln University in 1964, and had his MA from Brown University in 1973.

Career
Hoagland's poetry career was during the the struggle of civil rights in the United States in mid-1960s. Using the incidences that inspired his writings, Hoagland wrote and published his second book, Black Velvet in 1970 by Broadside Press. Broadside was a publisher in Detroit also involved with the printing of poet in the Black Arts Movement.

Hoagland is a teacher and college professor. Fanonne Jeffers, in a review for Black Issues Book Review said "[T]here is a strut to Hoagland’s poems and a didactic quality, but what makes this book a largely satisfying and complicated."

Theme and style
Hoagland’s works focus on an individual experience, a technique he uses to delve racial politics. He observes the black community and uses the jazz rhythms of black music in his poems while incorporating the individual lives. For instance, in his poem Just Words, he revisited the life of Frederick Douglass. Maya Angelou described him as "someone who cares and someone who comprehends."

Hoagland’s influences in his poem has reflected the lives of John Cage and other notable poets like Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Martin Espada, who was a contributor of the foreword to Here: New and Selected Poems said Hoagland is interested in people and their shared experience: "The people crowding these poems might spring from a vast mural of African and African-American history. He is a poet of the defiant. But he is also a poet of the dejected, the despairing, the ones with boll weevil souls."

Legacy
Hoagland was a Fellow of Brown University in creative writing from 1971 to 1973. He won the Black World (magazine), and the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction in 1974. He has been recognized by Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation's Creative Artists Fellowship in 1975, a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1984, and the Artists Foundation Statewide Poetry Competition Award in 1986.

Literally works
Editing
 * Ten Poems: A Collection, (American Studies Institute, 1968)
 * Black Velvet (Broadside Press, 1970)
 * Scrimshaw (Patmos Press, 1976)
 * This City and Other Poems (Spinner Publications, 1997)
 * Here: New and Selected Poems (Leapfrog Press, 2002)
 * The New Black Poetry (edited by Clarence Major, 1969)
 * New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary
 * American Literature (edited by Abraham Chapman, 1972)
 * Dues: An Anthology of New Earth Writings (edited by Ron Welburn, 1973)
 * Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings (edited by Quincy Troupe and Rainer Schulte, 1975)