[NFBMD] FW: [lbph] June events at LBPH

Thu May 12 17:35:15 UTC 2016

Hello all,

The Pratt Library had arranged for the authors to speak about their books. These talks and discussions will take place at the library for the blind and physically handicapped. Here are the announcements so that you have time to read the books. 

Read below. 

Sharon Maneki, President

National Federation of the Blind of Maryland

410-715-9596

From: LBPH [mailto:lbph-bounces at lists.sailor.lib.md.us] On Behalf Of Leslie Bowman -LBPH-
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2016 10:22 AM
To: lbph at lists.sailor.lib.md.us
Subject: {Spam?} [lbph] June events at LBPH

Writers LIVE: Tyehimba Jess, Olio 

Wednesday, June 8 at 6:30pm to 8:00pm 

MD State Library for the Blind & Physically Handicapped 415 Park Ave., Baltimore MD 21201 

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Writers LIVE: Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Thursday, June 9 at 6:30pm to 8:00pm 

MD State Library for the Blind & Physically Handicapped 415 Park Ave., Baltimore MD 21201 

Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.

Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

Carol Anderson is professor of African American studies at Emory University. She is the author of many books and articles, including Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 and Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights: 1944-1955. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Writers LIVE: Mikita Brottman, The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison 

Wednesday, June 15 at 6:30pm to 8:00pm 

Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped 415 Park Ave., Baltimore MD 21201 

On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club with a group of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. She assigns them ten dark, challenging classics -- including Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” and Nabokov’s Lolita -- books that don’t flinch from evoking the isolation of the human struggle, the pain of conflict, and the cost of transgression.

Though The Maximum Security Book Club never loses sight of the moral issues raised in the selected reading, it refuses to back away from the unexpected insights offered by the company of these complex, difficult men. It is a compelling, thoughtful analysis of literature -- and prison life -- like nothing you’ve ever read before.

Mikita Brottman, professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies and the MA Program in Critical Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), is an author and psychoanalyst with particular interests in true crime, forensics, psychoanalysis, animals, abjection, and the unexplained. She has a Ph.D in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, in which she focused on contemporary critical theory. She is the author of numerous academic books, including High Theory, Low Culture, The Solitary Vice, and Hyena, as well as commercial books like The Great Grisby.  She also teaches prisoners with the Jessup Correctional Institute Prison Scholars Program

Writers LIVE: Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education 

Tuesday, June 21 at 6:30pm 

Maryland State Library for the Blind & Physically Handicapped 415 Park Ave., Baltimore MD 21201 

How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It also means witnessing the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and so many others killed by police or vigilante violence.

In Invisible Man, Got the Whole Word Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity. Smith unapologetically upends reigning assumptions about black masculinity, rewriting the script for black manhood so that depression and anxiety aren't considered taboo, and feminism and LGBTQ rights become part of the fight.

Mychal Denzel Smith is a Knobler Fellow at The Nation Institute and a contributing writer for The Nation magazine. He has also written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Salon, The Guardian and other publications and has been a featured commentator on NPR, BBC radio, CNN, MSNBC and others.

These events are part of our collaboration with Enoch Pratt. 

-- 

Leslie Bowman

Branch Chief

Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Division of Library Development & Services

415 Park Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland 21201-3603

leslie.bowman at maryland.gov <mailto:leslie.bowman at maryland.gov> 

www.lbph.lib.md.us <http://www.lbph.lib.md.us/> 

410-230-2454 (office)

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