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
