Etheridge Knight

Etheridge Knight was born on the nineteenth of April 1931 in Corinth, Mississippi, one of seven children of Etheridge "Bushie" Knight, a labourer who later worked on the Kentucky Dam, and Belzora Cozart Knight. The son bore his father's name. The family knew poverty, and in his youth Etheridge moved with them to Paducah, Kentucky, where the great river towns and their juke joints, pool halls, and gaming rooms first schooled his ear in the spoken "toasts" — the narrative oral tradition that would later beat through his verse.

Knight left school at sixteen and, in 1947, enlisted in the United States Army. He served as a medical technician through the Korean War, carrying home both a wound and a lasting trauma, and afterward fell into an addiction that led, in 1960, to arrest and an eight-year sentence for robbery. It was inside the Indiana State Prison that poetry found him and remade him.

From that confinement came Poems from Prison (1968), published as he regained his freedom, a debut that announced one of the essential voices of the Black Arts Movement. His later books, among them Belly Song and Other Poems and The Essential Etheridge Knight, drew a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts support, and the American Book Award. He earned his bachelor's degree from Martin University in 1990.

Etheridge Knight died of lung cancer on the tenth of March 1991 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He turned a prison cell into a house of song, and gave the unheard a language worthy of their dignity. His voice endures.