Etheridge Knight

Etheridge Knight was born on the nineteenth of April 1931 at Corinth, Mississippi, the second of seven children of Bushie Knight, a labourer, and Belzora Cozart Knight, a domestic worker. The family moved as part of the Great Migration to Paducah, Kentucky, when he was seven and to Indianapolis when he was twelve. He completed the eighth grade and dropped out of the segregated Crispus Attucks High School at fourteen to work at the Indianapolis pool halls and street corners that across the following decade gave him his vernacular, his sense of orality, and his addiction to morphine.

He served in the United States Army Medical Corps from 1947 to 1951 — including combat service in Korea, during which he was wounded by shrapnel and given morphine for pain management. The morphine prescription became a lifelong heroin addiction. He worked across the 1950s as an itinerant labourer and street performer of the toasts — the African American oral epic-narrative form whose practitioners he would across his career formally describe as his principal poetic forebears.

In 1960 he was sentenced at Indianapolis to eight years at the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City for armed robbery committed to support his addiction. He served the eight-year term and began across the prison library reading the work of the Romantic and Modernist English-language traditions. He corresponded across his imprisonment with Gwendolyn Brooks (placed in this archive) and with the editor Dudley Randall of the Broadside Press at Detroit, who published in 1968 his first collection — Poems from Prison — that established his reputation within six months of release. He was released from Michigan City the same year.

He published over the following twenty-three years three further collections — Belly Song and Other Poems of 1973, Born of a Woman of 1980, and The Essential Etheridge Knight of 1986. He taught poetry-as-therapy workshops at the Indiana State Hospital at Madison, at the carceral writing programmes at Pittsburgh State Prison and at Northwestern Penitentiary, and at the Free People's Poetry Workshop he conducted in his Indianapolis apartment for the last decade of his life.

He died of lung cancer at Indianapolis on the tenth of March 1991, at fifty-nine.

He is honored here as the poet of the American carceral system.