Russell Atkins

Russell Atkins was born Russell Phillip Kelly on the twenty-fifth of February 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio. His biological father was Perry Kelly and his mother Sarah Harris; the boy was raised and adopted within a household of women — Mamie Belle Atkins, Willie Mae Allen, and their mother — and it is from that home that he took the name Atkins. From these Cleveland beginnings he would spend nearly a century rooted in the same city he transformed into a wellspring of the American avant-garde.

A poet, playwright, and composer, Atkins became one of the earliest concrete poets in the United States, arranging words upon the page so that their very placement carried meaning. Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten were early champions of his work. His books include Phenomena (1961), Objects (1963), Heretofore (1968), Maleficum (1971), and Here in The (1976), his only full-length collection. His verse dramas, among them The Abortionist, were conceived to be set to music, uniting his gifts as poet and composer.

In 1950 Atkins co-founded, with his friend Adelaide Simon, the little magazine Free Lance: a magazine of poetry and prose, whose first issue carried an introduction by Langston Hughes. Sustained through Free Lance Press, it endured for three decades and came to be regarded as one of the most significant Black literary journals of national importance in its era, a Cleveland institution that gave voice to experimental writers.

His stature was recognized late and warmly: in 2019 Cleveland State University's Poetry Center issued World'd Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins, edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough, and the city named a street in his honor as "Russell Atkins Way." He died on the fifteenth of August 2024, at the age of ninety-eight. May the honored ancestor Russell Atkins be remembered as the sovereign of Cleveland's avant-garde, who made the page itself sing.