Community Gathering & Reading

One Book One Bronx Reading Group: Olio by Tyehimba Jess

Tue, Feb 2, 2021

7:00 PM–8:30 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below.

One Book One Bronx: Olio by Tyehimba Jess
Tuesdays 7:00-8:30 PM (EST)
2/2: pgs 1-60
2/9: pgs 61-150
2/16: pgs 151-227
2/23: Tyehimba Jess will join the conversation

Click here to register for this reading discussion group. Free and open to the public.

Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess‘s Pulitzer-prize winning second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

One Book One Bronxis a new style reading group that inspires, encourages, and delights readers. Every week, we meet to discuss one book that reflects the people of the Bronx.

Presented by: One Book One Bronx & Literary Freedom Project, Lift Every Voice, Lehman College. Lehman College Library. CUNY Center for the Humanities.

Tyehimba Jess is a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, and has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters / Celebrating African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

This event is sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at The Graduate Center, CUNY in collaboration with One Book One Bronx, and Leonard Lief Library at Lehman College, CUNY, who are hosting a series of eclectic programs and reading groups as part of a nation-wide initiative, Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters. Lift Every Voice is a yearlong national public humanities initiative sponsored by the Library of America and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture that seeks to engage participants in a multifaceted exploration of African American poetry, the perspectives it offers on American history and the on-going struggle for racial justice, and the universality of its imaginative response to the personal experiences of Black Americans over three centuries. These events are also in celebration of the recent publication ofAfrican American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, a literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present. Edited by Kevin Young.