Description
Wanda Coleman was born on November 13,
1946 and grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. Coleman's poetry is widely
anthologized and published, and her poetry collection
Bathwater
Wine
received the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In addition to her poetic
career, Coleman was also successful across genres. She had a well-known column in the
Los Angeles Times and won an Emmy for her writing on
Days of Our Lives. The collection contains work produced by
Coleman between 1960 and 2013, including manuscripts and drafts of her published poetry and
prose, journalism, writing for film and television, and spoken word recordings, as well as
many unpublished writings. In addition, there is a wealth of correspondence with major
literary figures and institutions, activist materials, and ephemera relating to Coleman's
professional and personal life.
Background
Wanda Coleman was born on November 13, 1946 in Watts and raised in South Central Los
Angeles. When she was eighteen, she married her first husband, Jerry Coleman, with whom she
had two children, Anthony and Luanda Tunisia. Coleman retained custody of the children when
she and Jerry divorced in 1969, and struggled to survive and write as a single mother. She
worked as an editor for Players, a conscious Black
gentleman's magazine, from 1972-1974, and in the mid 1970s, she moved to Hollywood, where
she became an active participant in the spoken word and poetry communities, penning works
for Studio Watts and becoming a fixture at Beyond Baroque in Venice. In 1977, she published
a chapbook, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, followed by a
full-length collection of poems, Mad Dog Black Lady (1979)
with Black Sparrow Press, beginning a publishing relationship that would last for over
thirty years and produce twelve books in various genres. Her third child, Ian, with her
second husband Stephen Grant, was born in 1978. Coleman was also an acclaimed performance
artist known for her impactful readings. In the 1980s, her presence in the LA spoken word
scene led her to collaborate with seminal punk figures such as Exene Cervenka (X) and Lydia
Lunch, and she worked with New Alliance records to release a number of solo and split
recordings. Coleman attended Valley Junior College and Cal State L.A., and went on to teach
at UCLA extension, Cal State Long Beach, Naropa, and Loyola Marymount University, where she
held the Fletcher Jones chair in literature and writing. Prolific across genres, Coleman
wrote poetry, short stories, novels, nonfiction, and plays, as well as scripts for film and
television, winning an Emmy for her work on on Days of Our
Lives in 1976 and working as a featured columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Coleman is one of the most widely anthologized and published
poets of her generation, appearing in prestigious collections such as Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology and The
Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. Her poetry collection Bathwater Wine received the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize,
Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001) was a finalist for the
National Book Award, and her honors include a Guggenheim, an NEA fellowship, and the Poetry
Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. With her husband of thirty years, poet and
visual artist Austin Straus, she hosted "The Poetry Connexion" on KPFK from 1981-1994. She
died November 22, 2013. In November of 2015, the Ascot branch of the Los Angeles public
library in Watts, where Coleman spent many of her formative years reading and writing, was
renamed the Wanda Coleman Branch in her honor.
Restrictions
Property rights to the physical objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All
other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the
responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the
copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not
hold the copyright.