Conversation & Reading

Tyehimba Jess Reading & Conversation

Tue, Feb 23, 2021

7:00 PM–8:30 PM

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

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Join Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess will participate in a reading and dialogue on Olio as part of the One Book One Bronx book discussion group. 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. Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess’s award-winning second book Olio 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.

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

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

This event is presented and co-sponsored by One Book One Bronx, Literary Freedom Project, and Leonard Lief Library at Lehman College, CUNY, in collaboration with The Center for the Humanities and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at The Graduate Center, 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.