Rate My Professor Jeffrey Lamar Coleman

Jeffrey Lamar Coleman is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland. He received a B.A. in Communications, with an emphasis in journalism and advertising, from Winthrop University in 1987, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in poetry, from Arizona State University in 1993, and a Ph.D. in American Studies, with an emphasis in literature and culture, from the University of New Mexico in 1997. Between his undergraduate and graduate studies, Coleman worked as an advertising copywriter for Young and Rubicam in New York. His areas of research specialization include literature of the American Civil Rights Movement, music of social consciousness and protest, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. He specializes in teaching contemporary American literature, creative writing, and multiethnic literature.

Coleman is the author of Words of Protest, Words of Freedom: Poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement and Era, published by Duke University Press, the first comprehensive collection of poems written during and in response to the American civil rights struggle of 1955–75, featuring poets such as Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Derek Walcott, among others. He also authored Spirits Distilled: Poems, published by Red Hen Press, a debut collection exploring subjects including the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., September 11, the war in Iraq, and the influence of Gwendolyn Brooks and James Baldwin. His recent creative and scholarly work appears in Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience, and The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century. Coleman serves as an associate editor and poetry editor of The Journal of Hip Hop Studies and has served as guest curator and editor for Delaware Poetry Review. Recent courses taught include Scream and Shout!: American Literature and Music as Social Protest, From Thoreau to January 6: Democracy, Civility, and Community in American Letters, and Literature of the American Civil Rights Movement.