The Program for Learning and Community Engagement at Texas A&M University-Texarkana will present award-winning poet Dr. Jericho Brown for a poetry workshop and reading on Thursday, April 27, in the Tri-State Iron & Metal Atrium on the third floor of the University Center on the A&M-Texarkana campus, 7101 University Ave., Texarkana, Texas.
The workshop will get underway at 4 p.m. The poetry reading is set for 6 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.
Dr. Brown’s first collection of poetry, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the 2009 American Book Award and has received tremendous praise since its release. His second collection of poetry, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), was nominated for the NAACP award for poetry and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The collection was named one of the best books of 2014 by Library Journal and made The Believer’s top five Books of the Year.
Dr. Brown grew up in Louisiana and worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He has published poems in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award and the Hurston Wright Poetry Prize.
Dr. Brown is an associate professor in English and creative writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University.
“Jericho Brown’s poems are a testament to the power and intensity of language in their passionate exploration of race, sexuality, and love and what it means to be human,” said Dr. Doris Davis, Regents Professor of English at A&M-Texarkana. “A musical embrace of the sacred and profane, his poems offer understanding and celebration.”
PLACE is a faculty-led program designed to create a community of learners comprising A&M-Texarkana students, faculty, staff and the community at large.
“Faculty members annually choose a common theme around which to organize a lecture series and other activities that provide focal points for learning and discussion,” said Dr. Michael Perri, associate professor of history and chair of the PLACE Committee. This year’s theme is “Race and Ethnicity.”
PLACE’s goal is to expose its community of learners to a diversity of ideas from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
For more information, contact Dr. Michael Perri at Michael.Perri@tamut.edu or Dr. Craig Nakashian at Craig.Nakashian@tamut.edu.