N. H. Pritchard facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
N. H. Pritchard
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| Born | Norman Henry Pritchard October 22, 1939. |
| Died | February 8, 1996 (aged 56) Eastern Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | poet, artist |
| Education | NYU, Columbia |
Norman Henry Pritchard (October 22, 1939 – February 8, 1996), was an American poet. He was a member of the Umbra poets, a collective of Black writers in Manhattan's Lower East Side founded in 1962. Pritchard's avant-garde poetry often includes unconventional typography and spacing, as in "Harbour," or lack sentences entirely, as in " " ".
Biography
Pritchard was born in New York City to a Jamaican father and Trinidadian mother; he was raised in Harlem and the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
He studied for a B.A. degree at New York University, where he was president of his campus Fine Arts Society and an active contributor to his college's literary magazine. Pritchard did graduate work at Columbia University, taught briefly at the New School for Social Research, and was a poet-in-residence at Friends Seminary.
Prior to his time with the Umbra Poetry Workshop, Pritchard was acquainted or became friends with many artists, writers, and poets in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, including Philip Guston, Bill Komodore, Reuben Kadish, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Paul Blackburn, and many others who would frequently meet at the Cedar Tavern near NYU.
During the years he was a member of the Umbra poets, Pritchard's work appeared in magazines and journals such as Athanor, the East Village Other, Gathering, Liberator, Negro Digest, Poetry Northwest, Sail, and Season.
During his lifetime, Pritchard's poetry was published in two single-author volumes: The Matrix: Poems, 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and Eecchhooeess (New York University Press, 1971). His poetry was also included in compilations and anthologies including New Jazz Poet (1967), The New Black Poetry (1969), In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969), and Natural Process (1971), edited by Ted Wilentz and Tom Weatherly.
Pritchard stopped publishing in the early 1970s, and before his early death from cancer was residing in eastern Pennsylvania.
