18 Facts About Essex Hemphill

Essex Hemphill was an openly gay American poet and activist.

Essex Hemphill is known for his contributions to the Washington, DC art scene in the 1980s, and for openly discussing the topics pertinent to the African-American gay community.

Essex Hemphill was born April 16,1957, in Chicago, Illinois, to Warren and Mantalene Hemphill, and was the eldest of five children.

Essex Hemphill would go on to achieve his degree in English at the University of the District of Columbia.

Essex Hemphill performed at other institutions, including Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Essex Hemphill continued performing his rhythmic, spoken word poetry, and in 1983, received a grant from Washington Project for the Arts to perform an "experimental dramatization" of poetry entitled Murder on Glass, alongside Parkerson and Jones.

Essex Hemphill began publishing his own collections of poetry during this time, beginning with Diamonds Was in the Kitty and Some of the People We Love, and followed by the more favorably reviewed Earth Life and Conditions.

Essex Hemphill would garner more national attention when his work was included in In the Life, an anthology of poems from black, gay artists, compiled by Hemphill's good friend, lover, and fellow author, Joseph F Beam.

Essex Hemphill's poetry has been published widely in journals, and his essays have appeared in Obsidian, Black Scholar, CALLALOO, and Essence among others.

In 1986, Essex Hemphill received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Essex Hemphill made appearances in a number of documentaries between 1989 and 1992.

Essex Hemphill worked with Emmy award-winning filmmaker Marlon Riggs on two documentaries:Tongues Untied which looked into the complex overlapping of black and queer identities, and Black is.

In 1992, Essex Hemphill published his largest collection of poetry and short stories, entitled Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, which included recent work, but selection from his earlier poetry collections, Earth Life and Conditions.

Essex Hemphill wrote pieces such as "Family Jewels," which conveyed his frustrations about white bigotry, specifically within the gay community.

Essex Hemphill argued that excluding the faces of the black male subjects demonstrated the fetishism of African Americans by whites in the gay community.

Essex Hemphill goes on to critique both the institutionalized patriarchy, and dominant gender identities within society.

Loneliness in Essex Hemphill's work is a traumatic feeling, a constant sense of rejection.

Essex Hemphill defined loneliness as a sense of being, marked by suffering without public recognition.