Pulitzer Prize Winner Tyehimba Jess to Read Poetry at HSU

Pulitzer Prize winner Tyehimba Jess will read his poetry at the Lawrence Clayton Poets & Writers Speaker Series on April 6, 2018. Jess will hold a question and answer session at 3:30 p.m., a poetry reading at 7:30 p.m. with a reception and book signing to follow. All events are free and open to the public.

Jess’s book “Olio” was the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and several other awards. The Pulitzer Prize citation called Olio “a distinctive work that melds performance art with the deeper art of poetry to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.”

His book “leadbelly: poems” was selected by poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named “leadbelly” one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” A reviewer for Publishers Weekly stated that “the collection’s strength lies in its contradictory forms; from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song, all are soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one’s talent.”

Dr. Robert Fink, the Bond Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hardin-Simmons University, who plans the yearly Lawrence Clayton Poets & Writers Series, praised Jess’s writing and particularly his deep characters,

“Olio, Tyehimba Jess’s uniquely orchestrated Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection of persona poems, introduces us to a cast of reconstructed historical characters who, through Jess’s loving, sensitive depictions, no longer risk caricature, but ‘have depth,’ ‘multiple dimensions,’ ‘multiple sides of their humanity.’* All of these characters—the singers, the artists, the performers, the poets, offer their stories, inviting us to enter their paradoxical, painful and joyful world of displaced, creative individuals celebrating what it means to be human, flawed and beautiful.”

Tyehimba Jess, a Detroit native, currently lives in New York where he is an Associate Professor of English at CUNY College of Staten Island. He has previously taught at the Julliard School and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His B.A. is from the University of Chicago, where he studied public policy. His M.F.A. is from New York University.

Jess is the poetry and fiction editor of the AAR /African American Review (A Johns Hopkins University Press publication). He is a two-time member of the Chicago Green Mill Slam poetry team, a former artist-in-residence with Cave Canem, Chicago’s Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana, and he exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference.

His poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including: American Poetry Review; Ploughshares; Indiana Review; Nashville Review; Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry; and in Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century.

For more information on Tyehimba Jess or the Lawrence Clayton Poets & Writers Speaker Series, contact Dr. Robert Fink at (325) 670-1214.

*Jess, Tyehimba. “The Unconventional Poetry Of Tyehimba Jess.” Interview by Dan Wanschura, NPR, Weekend Edition Saturday, Interlochen Public Radio, 15 July 2017, http://www.interlochenreview.org/tyehimba-jess.