His poems have been published in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, and The New Yorker, among others.

[1][2] Born Nelson Demery III and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown later changed his name and graduated from Dillard University, where he was initiated as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, through the Beta Phi chapter, in the fall of 1995.

He is an associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Brown's third book, a collection of poems titled The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), garnered widespread critical acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

[2] Brown published his fourth book in 2023, How We Do it: Black Writers on Craft, Practice and Skill, an anthology of 31 essays and interviews from African American authors.