Boy In the Snow by Tyehimba Jess

From Volume 28, 2000

“I wrote this poem in the mid 90’s after seeing police photos of a young black man shot by police lying dead in the fresh South Side snow. The picture haunted me then and still does to this day. I did not realize that I would have occasion to write many, many more such poems about Black folks being killed by police, so many that it would be a constant presence in my life. I mourn the passing of this young man, who would likely be old enough to be a grandfather by now, and all the would be Black grandfathers that were one police bullet away from living out their lives.”

Tyehimba Jess was born in Detroit, Michigan, and earned a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from New York University. He is the author of Olio (Wave Books, 2016), winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005), winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. He is the poetry and fiction editor of African American Review and an associate professor of English at the College of Staten Island.