Guides: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) & the ULS Collection: Black Poets Speak Out

November 9-10, 2016 Event - Black Poets Speak Out

A community workshop, reading, exhibition, and reception featuring poets Amanda Johnston, Mahogany Browne, and Jericho Brown.

Schedule of Events:

Interactive Black Poets Speak Out Community Workshop

November 9, 2016 - 6:30pm

Black Poets Speak Out founders Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston led an interactive community workshop on Poetry and Practice

#BlackPoetSpeakOut: Pittsburgh Community Reading

November 9, 2016 - 7:30pm

This community reading that was open to all.

All Readers Share A Poem By A Black Poet. Each poet will begin their set with: "My name is (insert name). I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.”

or for allies... "My name is (insert name). I submit this poem in solidarity with Black Poets Speak Out. I will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.”

Each poet should try to record one poem during the performance to be added to the http://blackpoetsspeakout.tumblr.com/ archive.

Black Poets Speak Out Reading and Reception

November 10, 2016 - 5:30pm

The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics will hosted poets Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston, organizers of Black Poets Speak Out. The project began as a hashtag video campaign on a Tumblr site, featuring videos from black poets reading poetry in response to police violence against African Americans. Since its inception in 2014, black poets around the world have contributed videos to the project and curated Black Poets Speak Out readings in their communities.

Thanks to support from The Heinz Endowments, the Year of Diversity at the University of Pittsburgh, and to our community partner, the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater.

Redbone by Mahogany L. Browne
Call Number: PS3602.R7364 R43 2015
ISBN: 9780996139083
Publication Date: 2016
Edited by Randall Horton. Nominated for an NAACP Image Award. "What I may love most about REDBONE is the way it strains formally, with syntax and diction, with voice and perspective, searching for the right space on the page to make of this complex family story which, like most family stories, is made of sweetness and plain old hurt a kind of bearable song. It's such a moving act. Such a caring and true telling. Such a singing." Ross Gay. Item number: 31735069625675
Smudge by Mahogany Browne
Call Number: PS3602.R7364 S68 2015
ISBN: 9780989641579
Publication Date: 2015
"Acclaimed poet Mahogany L. Browne triumphs again with her latest poetry collection SMUDGE, a powerful, intimate, and complex portrait of a girl who deserves more than what she is given: a world in which our hero is both painfully invisible and vulnerably exposed. Browne masterfully invites us into this girl's life with language that is evocative, nuanced and immediate. The result is a book that is incredibly present. You live each moment presented in the book as if it were your own, and feel deeply the girl's fears and her humiliations, her hopeful trust and blind love, her shifting sense of safety and self. But despite the honest and harrowing heartbreak that finds its way into the girl, the book nonetheless has a defiant beauty, a strength of character and self that willfully defies the limits others attempt to put on this girl. Browne continues her tradition of creating rich, unflinching, and unapologetic work cataloguing the world as she sees it, and SMUDGE sees her at the top of her game." Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, NEA Poetry Fellow & author of The Year of No Mistakes. Item number: 31735069820607
The New Testament by Jericho Brown
Call Number: PS3602.R699 A6 2014
ISBN: 9781556594571
Publication Date: 2014
Honored as a "Best Book of 2014" by Library Journal. Honored as a "Standout Book of 2014" by American Poet magazine. Winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, 2015. NPR.org writes: "In his second collection, The New Testament, Brown treats disease and love and lust between men, with a gentle touch, returning again and again to the stories of the Bible, which confirm or dispute his vision of real life. 'Every last word is contagious,' he writes, awake to all the implications of that phrase. There is plenty of guilt--survivor's guilt, sinner's guilt--and ever-present death, but also the joy of survival and sin. And not everyone has the chutzpah to rewrite The Good Book." NPR.org. Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. He currently teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Item number: 31735069625659
Please by Jericho Brown
Call Number: PS3602.R699 P54 2008
ISBN: 9781930974791
Publication Date: 2008
Winner of the American Book Award (2009). Please explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, Please is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African American/male identity and sexuality. Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems' chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music. In Please, Jericho Brown sings the influence soul culture has on American life with the accuracy of the blues. Item number: 31735069625667