Emmett Till in Different States: Poems

Philip C. Kolin is the University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits The Southern Quarterly, a nationally renowned journal of the Arts in the South. He has taught at the University of Southern Mississippi for 41 years and has also traveled extensively in the Mississippi Delta where Till was slain. He is a native Chicagoan who graduated from Chicago State University, Mamie Till's alma mater, the University of Chicago, and received his Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University. Kolin has lived in various parts of Chicago from the near west side, where Emmett Till's grandmother Alma Sparkman lived in the 1940s, to the far south side to the northern suburbs of the city. Kolin has published more than 40 books, and over 200 scholarly articles, many on African American writers, themes, and influences, and at least 250 poems. Regarded as an international authority on Tennessee Williams, Kolin has published books on Williams with Cambridge University Press, Greenwood Publishing, McFarland, and Peter Lang. In particular, he has been recognized for his groundbreaking work on African American productions of Williams's plays in such scholarly journals as African American Review and Theatre History Studies. Kolin has also published four books on contemporary African American Women playwrights, including the first book-length critical study of experimental dramatist Adrienne Kennedy (Univ. of South Carolina Press) and two books on Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer for drama (with McFarland and Routledge), plus he has edited a prized collection of essays for Routledge as such dramatists as Sonia Sanchez, Glenda Dickerson, Pearl Cleage, and Anna Deavere Smith. A poet as well, Kolin has published seven collections of poems, Reading God's Handwriting (Kaufmann, 2012), and most recently Departures: Poems (Negative Capability Press, 2014).