Wanda Coleman

Wanda Evans was born on November 13, 1946, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, the eldest of four children of George Evans and Lewana Scott Evans. Her father was an ex-boxer — a friend and sparring partner of light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore — who ran a sign shop by day and worked the graveyard shift as a janitor at RCA Victor Records. Her mother worked as a seamstress and as a housekeeper, at one point in the home of Ronald Reagan. From these working-class beginnings, Coleman drew the unflinching material of a lifetime of poems.

She wrote her first verses as a child and saw her work in a local newspaper by the age of thirteen. Coming of age amid the racial tensions that erupted in the 1965 Watts uprising, she sharpened her craft in the writing workshops of her city — Budd Schulberg's Watts Writers Workshop, Studio Watts, and Beyond Baroque — while supporting herself as a medical secretary, magazine editor, journalist, and Emmy Award-winning scriptwriter.

Coleman became one of the defining voices of Los Angeles letters. Her collections — among them Imagoes, Bathwater Wine, which won the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001), a finalist for the National Book Award, and The World Falls Away (2011) — mapped the city's Black life with a ferocious, jazz-inflected candor. Widely known as "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles," she wrote of race, poverty, womanhood, and endurance without softening a single edge.

She died on November 22, 2013, in Los Angeles, her voice still carrying the streets that made her. May the honored poet of the city be remembered for the truth she never once diminished.