I am posting this update from 35,000 ft. up in the air over the awe-inspiring terrain of New Mexico on my way to the Mississippi Delta for four days of planting my poems in university classrooms, bookstores, galleries, and libraries.
In a way this trip to Mississippi really began in early 2012 when I recited poems to a crowd of more than 200 librarians at the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Awards Ceremony during the ALA annual conference. I was there to accept a BCALA poetry award for The Armageddon of Funk (Tia Chucha Press). One of the librarians in the room that day was Amy E. Mark, Information Literacy and Instruction Librarian & Associate Professor at the J.D. Library, University of Mississippi.
Amy and her librarian ilk are literary superheroes swooping into our lives to assist readers and writers. Thanks to her superpowers this week I am in Oxford conducting workshops with MFA students and Library Ambassadors, consulting on cultural competency and diversity, signing books, and giving a public reading/performance at the University of Mississippi this Thursday in Bryant Hall at 6pm.
After Oxford I head to Clarksdale. I have to thank Rosalind Wilcox, a friend from back in the day in Chicago, for that leg of the tour. I am anointing her, along with Amy, as a member of the Cultural Justice League, a fictional organization of literary superheroes that I just conjured up. Rosalind is now the very real Department Chair, Fine Arts at Coahoma College, Clarksdale, MS. An artist, musician, and teacher, she is owner and founder of Sun House Studios, a gallery, workspace, and community center.
Brad Hardisty at The Nashville Bridge blog wrote the following of Rosalind, AKA Mississippi Rosalee:
Rosealee is an accomplished singer/songwriter who also plays drums for two of the oldest Mississippi blues legends, Robert Belfour and LC Ulmer. In fact LC wrote a song for her on the M For Mississippi soundtrack, “Rosealee.”
She had named her art/performance space Sun House in honor of Son House, another Clarksdale native that inspired Led Zeppelin and Jack White among other rockers.
I will be reading/performing my poems at Sun House this Friday, February 8, 5pm, Rosalind was close to Guild Books and the Guild Complex (now the Guild Literary Complex) where I served as founding Executive Director for 10 years. I am thrilled to learn from Rosalind that she modeled Sun House after Guild’s commitment to combining arts and community.
Traveling South as a touring poet is exactly what I hoped to be doing after more than a year of scattering the seeds of The Armageddon of Funk in the hope that it would spread like… How about like kudzu? But without the shade induced killing. I have many people to thank for the stubborn unraveling of this collection of poems that moved from idea to manuscript, to loss, to manuscript, to reinvention, and again to revised manuscript, and finally to an actual book, as slowly as “molasses in the wintertime” as my mother would say. After Clarksdale I will try to give thanks to everyone who held the hand of this book as it learned to walk.
Please tell all your friends in the Delta about my upcoming appearances in Oxford and Clarksdale. To all librarians, curators, arts directors, educators, and cultural impresarios, you too can be anointed as a member of the Cultural Justice League. All you have to do is use your superpowers to get me to wherever your Metropolis happens to be.
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