Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.

Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. was born in 1895 in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of the poet and educator Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr. He grew up among his father's books and began writing as a boy. He attended Fisk University but left in his second year after developing tuberculosis.

Most of his verse was written during the years of his illness, much of it confined to bed. The Band of Gideon, and Other Lyrics, with an introduction by Cale Young Rice, appeared in Boston in 1918 and was his only book. Several of its poems were reprinted in James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).

He died of tuberculosis in Louisville in 1919, aged about twenty-three.