Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. She was an American poet, short-story and fiction writer, and essayist who published more than twenty books. In 1999, she became the first African American woman to receive the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of the American Academy of Poets for her poetry collection “Bathwater Wine.” “Mercurochrome” was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry. Coleman received several fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the George Drury Smith Award from the Beyond Baroque Literary Center in 2012.