Speaker

“Thank you for your willingness to come to the Eiteljorg to enlighten and inspire our visitors with your amazing family stories.” Alisa Nordholt-Dean, Director of Public Programs, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.

The first book I reread 20 times within a week at 9 or 10 years old was the 1968 anthology, I Am the Darker Brother. I devoured the poems. Thanks to editor Arnold Adoff who culled this collection of poetry as carefully as a weaver on his spinning wheel, and to Chicago librarian Charlene Rollins’s moving forward, everything you read here and see in my work as a poet began with that book — with those Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement poets. Yet at some point, song stole into my performances and academic lectures. It just felt right to represent the whole of my work and experiences as a writer, a traditionally-engaged cultural worker and a literary activist through all my lenses. I hope my work inspires young writers, in fact, I hope to inspire young and older people who don’t even know they’re writers yet.

Selected Performances/Readings