Joseph Seamon Cotter ✓

About Joseph Seamon Cotter

Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. was an American poet, playwright, and journalist from Louisville, Kentucky. He is most remembered for his posthumous one-act play On the Fields of France and his sole published poetry collection The Band of Gideon and Other Lyrics (1918). Cotter wrote during a period of intense racial tension surrounding World War I, and engaged themes of racial identity, wartime sacrifice, and personal grief within his writing, while also experimenting with free verse and rhythmic forms preceding stylistic innovations of the Harlem Renaissance. Cotter is often described as a forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance, despite his untimely death at age twenty-three due to tuberculosis. At the time of his death, Cotter left behind a body of sixty-five known poems and a single play that some scholars have argue demonstrates the potential to be among other leading voices in his generation.