Gary Copeland Lilley is originally from Sandy Cross, North Carolina, and was a longtime resident of Washington, D.C., where he was a founding member of the Black Rooster Collective. He received the D.C. Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry in 1996 and again in 2000, and he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2002. Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of four poetry collections: Alpha Zulu, Black Poem, The Reprehensibles, and The Subsequent Blues.

Books by Gary Copeland Lilley:

Other poems on the web by Gary Copeland Lilley:
"Standing on the Corner When Being Cool Went Blind"
Two poems
Two poems
Six poems
"For Peace in the Valley"

About The Bushman's Medicine Show:

"World, meet the Bushman, hoodoo artist of backcountry mythopoeisis at the edges of greatness and the Great Dismal Swamp. This 'politely unseen' conjurer out of Pentecostal piney woods, this descendent of 'pious white-dress-wearing / sisters of the low ground' will strum you his low-key luminosity within these blues-infused lines. Through shore leaves and holding cells, mean-street malingerers and post-Katrina lamentations, defiance of Jim Crow and prayers for peace at the crossroads—love, trouble, and transcendence—the Bushman signifies, sanctifies, and calls forth blessings from the ancestor spirits with his tutelary 'guitar that brought him home.' Reading these poems, you will enter into their exalted lowdown, and feel your soul infused with their break-bone pathos and celebration."
—Carolyne Wright