Essex Hemphill
Dr. Simmons, Ron
Essex Hemphill was born on April 16th, 1957.
He began writing poetry when he was 14 years old.
He started at the University of Maryland at College Park as a journalism major in the fall of 1975.
He would drop out and later enroll and receive an English degree from the University of the District of Columbia.
In 1978, Essex and his colleague, Kathy Elaine Anderson founded the Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature, a journal dedicated to the works of Black artists of that time.
It was during a 1980 poetry reading at Howard University that he “came out” as gay.
Essex and his two friends Larry Duckett and Wayson Jones, formed their own spoken word group, “Cinque” in 1982. The trio would perform around the D.C. area for captivated audiences.
In 1982, he self-published his first collection of poetry, Diamonds Was in the Kitty and Some of the People We Love, which was followed by Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986).
His poetry collections touched on the impact of AIDS on the Black and gay community and tackled life through the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender. He was a pioneer.
He received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1986.
That year he reached new levels of recognition when his poems were featured in Joseph F.Beam’s , In The Life, an unprecedented anthology of poetry, essays, interviews and short fiction from Black gay writers in the 1980s.
On the heels of this national recognition, he appeared in three documentaries, 1989s Looking for Langston, directed by Isaac Julien, and 1989’s Tongues Untied and 1992’s Black is…Black Ain’t, both directed by Marlon Riggs.
Joseph F. Beam died in 1988 and Essex worked with his mother until 1991 on the sequel to In The Life, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men.
Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men was published in 1991 and won the Lambda Literary Award that year.
The following year he published another collection of his poems and short stories, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry. The anthology won the National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award as well as a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts.
In 1993, he became a visiting scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities.
Essex Hemphill died on November 4th, 1995 from AIDS-related complications.
He died just one month before the first protease inhibitor, Saquinavir, was approved by the FDA.
A protease inhibitor is a medication that prevents viruses from making copies of itself.
Dr. Simmons, Ron