My New Orleans
05/24/2021
NEW ORLEANS (press release) – The Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage (SDUSMP) selected “Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana” as a recipient of its 2021 Phillis Wheatley Book Award. The announcement was made Friday, May 21, at the annual SDUSMP meeting, which was held virtually.
Established in 2011, SDUSMP is a nonprofit lineage society dedicated to preserving the memory of its members’ freed and enslaved ancestors. Its Phillis Wheatley Book Award recognizes works published within the past five years covering the topic of American slavery. The prize’s namesake was a Gambia native captured by slave traders as a child and sold to a family in Boston in 1761. She became the first African American to author a book, a 1773 collection of poems.
Arisa White. (Photo by Nye Lyn Tho)
The Rockland Public Library presents Arisa White, Thursday, May 20, at 6:30 p.m., over Zoom. This event, sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council as part of their “World in Your Library” series, is free and open to all.
Learn about the seven-year writing journey that started during White’s “Jesus Year,” when her mother asked, “Do you want to write your father in Guyana?” Unsure what to say, White began penning epistolary poems addressed to her father. The poems and prose became documents of her daily life, citations from books, quotations from artists and cultural thinkers, song lyrics, and reflections on White’s spiritual condition. Feeling that this question of fatherhood wasn’t something she wanted to tackle alone, she hosted a call for submissions and community epistolary workshops for participants to write personal letters to distance, absent, or dead fathers, and patriarchal figures. The common themes of abandonment insp