Brenda Marie Osbey

Brenda Marie Osbey is a poet and essayist working in English and French. She is the recipient of the American Book Award for All Saints: New and Selected Poems, and the Langston Hughes Award for History and Other Poems.

She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Louisiana Division of the Arts, and has been resident fellow of the MacDowell Colony; Millay Colony; Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; Bunting Institute of Harvard-Radcliffe; Camargo Foundation at Cassis, France; Dora Maar House at Ménerbes, France; and was 2018 Virginia Humanities Emilia Galli Struppa Fellow, and 2021–22 Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow.

Poet Laureate Emerita of Louisiana, she was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, and is editor of Gabriel Okara: Collected Poems (African Poetry Book Series). Studies of her work include the volume Summoning Our Saints: the Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey by John Wharton Lowe.