Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Olio, Tyehimba Jess will give a dynamic, free poetry reading on Thursday, Oct. 27 at 7-8:30 p.m.
Open to the public, the reading will be held in the Chemistry Building, Room 114. Detroit Mercy’s McNichols Campus bookstore has copies of Olio for sale and Jess will be available to sign books following the event. The bookstore will be open up until 7 p.m. on Thursday.
Jess, a Detroit native, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his book Olio. In 2004, his book Leadbelly was a winner of the National Poetry Series.
From Wave Books, publisher of Olio: “With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess’s much anticipated 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.”
The event is being co-sponsored by Detroit Mercy’s Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts & Education, the African American Studies Program and the Black Abolitionist Archive.
For more information, please visit www.udmercy.edu/english.
