John Zheng 
Conversations with Sterling Plumpp [EPUB ebook] 

Conversations with Sterling Plumpp is the first collection of interviews with the renowned poet of
Home/Bass and other much-admired works. Spanning thirty years and drawn from literary and scholarly journals and other media, these interviews offer insights into his poetic innovation of blues and jazz and his mastery of black vernacular in poetry. This collection seems fundamental to an understanding of the life and work of an African American poet who has been innovative in fusing blues and jazz rhythms with poetic insight and in vivifying the vernacular landscape of African American poetry.


Born in 1940 in Clinton, Mississippi, Plumpp has been living in Chicago since 1962.
Home/Bass received the 2014 American Book Award. The finest blues poet of his generation, Plumpp became a model for contemporary poetry and poetics and a leading figure in the tradition of blues/jazz poetry. He continues to reinvent the language while exploring the registers of individual and communal memory and of local, national, and global history. His poetry is important in attempts to define the black aesthetic from the era of the Harlem Renaissance to the seminal Black Arts Movement. It is also important for its re-articulation of the Great Migration, especially expressed by blues musicians who left Mississippi for Chicago.

About the author

John Zheng is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University and editor of African American Haiku: Cultural Visions; The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku; Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr.; Conversations with Dana Gioia; and Conversations with Sterling Plumpp; and coeditor of Conversations with Gish Jen, all published by University Press of Mississippi.