Evento

Blackbird Poetry Festival - 2017

HoCoPoLitSo and Howard Community College present The Blackbird Poetry Festival, a day devoted to verse, with student workshops, readings, book sales, and patrols by the poetry police.

This year's featured poet Tyehimba Jess has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Olio. He is Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team.

Jess is the author of two poetry collections: leadbelly (2004), a biography in poems of the legendary blues musician Huddie Lead Belly Ledbetter, and Olio (2016), about African American performers from before the Civil War up to World War I. About Olio, 2011 National Book award winner Nikky Finney said: Tyehimba Jess is inventive, prophetic, wondrous. He writes unflinchingly into the historical clefs of blackface, black sound, human sensibility. Jess fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares.