Man Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings and the bestselling Dark Star Trilogy, and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner and Professor of Creative Writing Patricia Smith read from their work as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series. Tickets required.
A conversation with Patricia Smith
Smith will be one of the featured poets at the 2021 Kalamazoo Poetry Festival on April 17. This year’s festival, which will be entirely online, has the theme of “From the Wreckage.”
Credit TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press
“My last book,
Incendiary Art, everyone told me beforehand, was a little bit too rough and there weren’t any moments of light in it,” Smith says. “I think we allow ourselves too many moments of light. I wanted to write a book that did not allow people to turn away from it. There are a lot of names in the book that people didn’t recognize. For instance, if I say Trevon Martin or Michael Brown, you recognize those names. But I wanted people to know that these types of things are happening in the American African community like a drumbeat. Because there isn’t video, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”