James Emanuel (born June 15, 1921 – September 28, 2013) was a poet and scholar from Alliance, Nebraska. Emanuel, who is ranked by some critics as one of the best and most neglected poets of the 20th century, published more than 300 poems, 13 individual books, an influential anthology of African-American literature, an autobiography, and more. He is also credited with creating a new literary genre, jazz-and-blues haiku, often read with musical accompaniment.
Early life
Born in Nebraska in 1921, Emanuel was raised in the state. He comes from a family with seven children where he is the fifth. Literature has been part of his life since a really young age. He was induced into stories, poetic rhythms and prose ny various authors. Due to this and all the readings he did reinforced and induced Emanuels ambition to become a writer. His childhood and adolescence were marked by racism which Emanuel says he owes less to the town's egalitarianism than to the more ideological drift of his family conversations and to his general popularity and success in school. He was a straight A student which gave him confidence to obtain a good work and successful life.
Emanuel, before after graduating highschool worked on farms and ranches and this work experience served as an inspiration to write poems such as "Three Chores: One Country Day". He spent his early years in the western United States where he worked at a variety of jobs. At age twenty he joined the United States Army and served as confidential secretary to the Assistant Inspector General of the U.S. Army Benjamin O. Davis Sr. He did this in order to make enough money to pay for college. He did wartime duty as a staff sergeant with the 93rd Infantry Division in the Pacific.
Academic and Professional Life
After his discharge, he did his undergraduate work at Howard University. In 1950 he was awarded his bachelor's degree, summa cum laude. And in his time at Howard he found motivation to write. He published several poems in college anthologies and campus newspapers. On that same year he moved to Chicago and got married to Mattie Etha Johnson. He started working on his master's degree and obtained it from Northwestern University (M.A.) while working as civilian chief in the preinduction section of the Army and Air Force Induction Station. After a long time in this position he resigned because he thought that he had been passed over because of his race.Through his time at Northwestern he became more convienced that he wanted to write. His professors praised him for his work and called him a real poet. After hard work and rejections Emanuel was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship which supported his work at Northwestern and received the M.A. degree in 1953, and his first year of work toward the Ph.D. degree at Columbia University (Ph.D.). During time at Columbia he worked as a teacher at the Harlem YWCA Business School. In 1957, He moved to New York City, where he taught at the City College of New York (CUNY), where in the 1960s he taught the college's first class on African-American poetry and mentored future scholars such as Addison Gayle Jr. He worked on his poetry regularly which was encouraged by various well known publication sources such as the New York Times.