Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her collection Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998) received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1999, and Mercurochrome (Black Sparrow Press, 2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. Her earlier collections include Imagoes (Black Sparrow Press, 1983) and African Sleeping Sickness (Black Sparrow Press, 1990). She worked as a medical secretary, magazine editor, journalist, and Emmy Award-winning scriptwriter, and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
