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Jabari Asim is Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[1]

Asim is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Crisis magazine, a journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910. He spent 11 years at the Washington Post, where he served as deputy editor of the book review section. For three years he also wrote a syndicated column on political and social issues for the Post.

Asim is the acclaimed author of What Obama Means, (William Morrow January 20, 2009; ISBN 978-0061711336) as well as the author of the highly praised and controversial The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, And Why (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; ISBN 978-0618197170.)

He is a frequent public speaker and commentator who has appeared on The Today Show, The Colbert Report, Hannity & Colmes, the Tavis Smiley Show, the Diane Rehm show and countless other programs. He has lectured at many of the nation’s finest universities, including University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, Syracuse University and the University of Florida.

He is a former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle whose reviews and cultural criticism also have been published in The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Phoenix Gazette, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon.com, the Detroit News, The Village Voice, Hungry Mind Review, XXL, Code, Emerge, Essence, Africana.com and BlackElectorate.com.

A poet, playwright and fiction writer, Asim has published work in a number of anthologies and literary magazines. He was 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 (Ballantine); 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. 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.

His poetry was also published in the anthologies Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, Beyond The Frontier: African-American Poetry for the 21st Century, and appeared most recently in The Harlem Reader: A Celebration of New York’s Most Famous Neighborhood from the Renaissance Years to the 21st Century; and in From The Black Arts Movement to Furious Flower: A Collection of Contemporary African American Poetry.

The Road To Freedom, his first novel for young readers, was published in 2000. He is editor of Not Guilty: Twelve Black Men Speak Out on the Law, Justice and Life, published in November 2001.

His other children’s books include Whose Toes Are Those, Whose Knees Are These, and Daddy Goes to Work. Girl of Mine and Boy of Mine are due to be published spring 2010 by Little Brown.

In April 2009, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Jabari 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.

Asim’s debut work of fiction, A Taste of Honey, is a collection of sixteen connected stories told from multiple perspectives which take place in a fictional Midwestern town called Gateway in 1968, published by Broadway Books in March 2010. It was featured in the March 2010 issue of Essence Magazine.

Jabari Asim divides his time between Illinois and Maryland with his wife, Liana, and their five children.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jabari Asim", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0