Craft: Melvin Dixon

Melvin Dixon (1950-1992) was a poet and scholar, now mostly forgotten, who died of AIDS at 42 in 1992. Though he never got to be an old person, his brief output is not only a high water mark in poetry from the AIDS crisis, and poetry in general.

Dixon also translated from French (particularly the work of Leopold Senghor, a poet and the President of Senegal), was an English professor at Queens College, and published two books of poetry (Change of Territory and Love’s Instruments) and two novels (Trouble the Water and Vanishing Rooms) as well as a textbook, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature.

Dixon: “All our footprints lead the same.”