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"OSBEY, Brenda Marie (b. 1957), poet.
Brenda
Marie Osbey, born in New Orleans in 1957, has roots in Creole culture that run deep and give her work a haunting sense of
place. No one since Walker Percy has made more memorable music out of the names of the city's streets and the people who throng
them....the metropolis she summons up quickly and magically becomes a backdrop for a display of the ambiance of the Black
feminine mind. Her women lead lives that often erupt in violence and sometimes end with madness. But alongside all of this
-- and often because of it -- we find a riveting poignance and searing beauty....saturation in the Afro-Caribbean ambiance
of New Orleans's Faubourgs...enables Osbey to plunge the reader into the eerie world of the Bahalia women, with their roots
and tamborines, to introduce African Gods on the bankettes of the city... ."
John Lowe
Chapter Eight:
"An Interview with Brenda
Marie Osbey"
John Lowe
Chapter Three:
"Sequences Testifying for 'Nobodies':
Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah
and
Brenda Marie Osbey's
Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman"
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR: BOOKS
from Contemporary
Authors:
- Andrews, William L., and others, editors, Oxford Companion
to African American Literature, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1997.
- Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.
- Green, Carol Hurd, and Mary Grimley Mason, editors, American
Women Writers, Volume 5, Continuum Publishing, 1994.
- Humphries, Jefferson, and John Lowe, editors, The Future of
Southern Letters, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.
- Keller, Lynn, Forms of Expansion, University of Chicago
Press (Chicago, IL), 1997.
PERIODICALS
- American Book Review, April, 1992, Gardner McFall, review of Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, p. 28.
- Booklist, August,
1988, Mary Patricia Monaghan, review of In These Houses, p. 1885.
- Essence, June,
1984, Thulani Davis, review of Ceremony for Minneconjoux, p. 54; April, 1989, Paula Giddings, review of In These
Houses, p. 40.
- Library Journal, September
15, 1988, Louis McKee, review of In These Houses, pp. 86-87.
- New Orleans Magazine, November, 1997, Christina Masciere, "Poetically Correct, " interview with Osbey, pp. 31-34.
- Parnassus, spring,
1985, Calvin Hernton, review of Ceremony for Minneconjoux, pp. 525-530; fall, 1992, Ben Downing, review of Desperate
Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, p. 224-230.
- Southern Review, autumn,
1994, John Lowe, "An Interview with Brenda Marie Osbey, " pp. 812-824.
- Washington Post Book World, January 25, 1998, Jabari Asim, review of All Saints: New and Selected Poems, p. 9.
- Women's Review of Books, July, 1992, Colleen J. McElroy, "Seductive Histories, " review of Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, pp.
25-26.
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