Wanda Coleman was born and raised in Watts. She has been called the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles. Prior to recognition as the poetic voice of Los Angeles, she had many jobs, the editorial coordinator of an arts newsletter (for the Studio Watts organization), a medical secretary, a journalist, a proofreader, a waitress, and a Peace Corps/Vista recruiter.
What you may not know is that Coleman had a brief stint as a t.v. writer and won an Emmy award for her work as a staff writer on the NBC television soap opera Days of Our Lives (one of the very few soaps shot in Los Angeles) for the 1975-76 season.
Coleman's poetry, which has won widespread praise from reviewers has also been sometimes deemed hard to swallow for its grim portrayals of the down-on-their-luck characters who populate Los Angeles's streets.
Coleman's poems about love seethe with sexual and violent themes. In the 80s she was incredibly prolific and produced new work at an astonishing rate—in addition to her many published works she accumulated a collection of over 4,500 rejection slips (so take heart). Her poem "
Today I Am a Homicide in the North of the City" is often reprinted as an example of the poet's drawn-from-the-streets subject matter.
Although the term hadn't yet been coined during the rise of Coleman's career, she was a forerunner to the "poetry slam" movement that invigorated African-American literary communities with live poetry contests in the 1990s and 2000s.
In 2003 and 2004, Coleman became the first literary fellow of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Asked at about that time by the Poetry Society of America whether gender, sexual preference, or ethnicity figured more prominently than being an American in her self-identity as a poet, Coleman responded this way: "As a Usually Het Interracially Married Los Angeles-based African American Womonist Matrilinear Working Class Poor Pink/White Collar College Drop-out Baby Boomer Earth Mother and Closet Smoker Unmolested-by-her-father, I am unable to separate these and, as time progresses, resent having to fit into every niggling PC pigeon hole some retard trendoid academic with a grant or hidden agenda barfs up."
