Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim is an author, poet, playwright, associate professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, and since August 2007, has been the Editor-in-Chief of The Crisis magazine, a journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by historian and social activist W.E.B. Du Bois in 1910.

Asim was chosen by the National Book Foundation to serve on the nonfiction panel for the 2013 National Book Awards. Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation, lauded Asim’s ability to approach difficult topics with humility.

In April 2009, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Asim a fellowship in nonfiction, one of 180 fellowships awarded to artists, scientists and scholars in 2009 selected from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

From 2008 to 2010, Asim was Scholar-in-Residence in African-American Studies and in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Asim spent eleven years (1996–2007) at The Washington Post as deputy editor of the book review section, children's book editor, poetry editor, and editor of the Washington Post′s Education Review. For three years he also wrote a Washington Post Writers Group syndicated column on political and social issues for the Post. Asim is a former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Prior to his stint at The Washington Post Book World, Asim was book editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, during which time he was the only African American to supervise book/publishing coverage at a major metropolitan daily. His experience at the Post-Dispatch also included copy editor of the daily editorial and commentary pages, and arts editor of the weekend section.

An accomplished poet, playwright and fiction writer, Asim has published work in a number of anthologies and literary magazines. He is the only writer to have both poetry and fiction included in In The Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers; his short story Two Fools appeared in Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men In America; and his poems, along with Peace Dog, a one-act play, were published in Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence. His critical essay, What Is This New Thing? appears in The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. More recently, an excerpt from his novel-in-progress appeared in Brown Sugar: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction; his poetry was published in African American Writers: A Literary Reader; and an essay appeared in Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature.