Friday, October 18, 2013

Intersections in Creative Writing, Music, and History


Greetings, Class Community.

I wanted to take a moment to share an interview between poets and professors, Randall Horton and Tyehimba Jess.  Horton and Jess discuss persona poems,  language, titling complete works, McKoy (The Two-Headed Nightingale)  Sisters, freak show, and researching as a writer.

Arts@UNH Interview with Tyehimba Jess


Randall Horton is an associate professor of English at the University of New Haven in Connecticut and the author of The Definition of Place (2006) and The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street (2009). He is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship. Randall is a fellow of Cave Canem and a member of the AffrilachianPoets, two organizations that support African American poetry; and a member of the Symphony: The House That Etheridge Built, a reading collective named for the poet Etheridge Knight. An excerpt from Horton’s memoir, Roxbury, is newly released as a chapbook.

Tyehimba Jess bridges slam and academic poetry. His first collection, leadbelly (2005), an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life, was chosen for the National Poetry Series  and was voted one of the top three poetry books of the year by Black Issues Book Review. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted 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.”


TedxNashvlle - Tyehimba Jess - Syncopated Sonnets