Join renowned poets Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, and Reginald Dwayne Betts for an unforgettable evening in celebration of their work as poets, advocates, and educators. This event is sponsored by the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
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A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published ten collections of poetry, including Last Will, Last Testament, winner of the 2020 Judy Gaines Young Book Award, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry.
Accents Publishing is proud bring to you Masked Man, Black by iconic poet Frank X Walker, the author of two other Accents Publishing books: Last Will, Last Testament and About Flight. The poems in this new collection pack the immediacy and gravity of letters from the trenches of a war. What is at stake here is our humanity, dignity, way of life, our relationship to the truth.
A poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Reginald Dwayne Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society.
A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems “canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace” and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life.
Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011.
Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life.