Sunday September 13, 2015 – 3pm
Welcome Major Jackson back to Philadelphia for an interview and reading from his new poetry collection Roll Deep: Poems ($26.95 Norton). Major Jackson is author of a new book of poems, Roll Deep: Poems $26.95 Norton), as well as Holding Company and Hoops, both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. In 2006-07, he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Major will be interviewed by Warren Longmire, who will also read with him.
Sunday October 11, 2015 – 3pm
Welcome Keith Gilyard back to Philadelphia for an interview and reading from his new poetry collection Wing of Memory ($7.95 Whirlwind Press). Raymond Keith Gilyard is author of Wing of Memory ($7.95 Whirlwind Press) and three other books of poetry as well as five scholarly books including True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy and numerous text and articles. He is a professor of English at Penn State University who teaches and researches in the fields of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and African American literature. His primary interest lies in identifying intersections of African American English and composition practices. Advocating African American English as a legitimate discourse, Gilyard is a prominent voice in the movement to recognize ethnic and cultural discourses other than Standard English as valid. As a literary scholar, his interests have been in the interplay between African American literature and rhetorical criticism and in bio-critical work.
Keith will be interviewed by Lamont Steptoe, who will also read with him.
Sunday November 15, 2015 – 3pm
[Image result for gregory pardlo] Welcome Gregory Pardlo back to Philadelphia for an interview and reading from his new poetry collection Digest ($15.95 Four Way Books). Gregory Pardlo is author of Digest, which won the Pulitzer prize for Poetry in 2015. His first book, Totem, received the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Best American Poetry 2010, as well as several anthologies, including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lotos Club Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The New York Times. He is an associate editor of Callaloo, and his second collection, Digest, was published by Four Way Books in 2014. In 2015, he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Digest.
Gregory will be interviewed by Leonard Gontarek, who will also read with him.
