Poetry is the Message, The Message is Love

Program Description:  As corollaries of important political movements, African American poetry has long sought to express a sense of positive identity and to assert the sanctity and worth of black humanity. Cultural expressions of freedom permeate the work of black poets whose resistance takes shape as a complex conversation about poetic form, language, history, performance, and lyric agency. From poets of the Harlem Renaissance to today’s poets, we will survey poems that work to dignify black lives and whose life-affirming valence promotes the value of a pluralistic democracy.

Bio:  Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Absurd Man (2020). A recipient of fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, 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. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.