A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, Muscadine, received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of the Arts & Letters Poetry Award. Jerriod has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA and an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation of Boston, MA. A former John and Renee Grisham Writer-In-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Jerriod is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing there and Writer-in-Residence at Jackson State University.