AA&AS News

On Wednesday, November 2, 2011 the NOMMO African American Authors series begins its 2011-2012 season. Professor Alexs Pate hosts Percival Everettat 7:00 PM in Cowles Auditorium (located in the Hubert H. Humphrey Center.) Percival Everett is the author of nearly twenty novels, three collections of short fiction, and two volumes of poetry, including the recent collection Swimming Swimmers Swimming. Among his novels are Assumption and I Am Not Sidney Poitier, which won the Believer Book Award.

Posted by Walt Jacobs at 1:13 PM | Permalink

Esteemed Black Arts poet and playwright Amiri Baraka will share excerpts from his poems and plays in a conversation moderated by University of Minnesota Theater Professor Dominic Taylor. The event will take place on Friday, October 14, 4:30-6:00, at the Arena Theater on the 2nd floor of the Rarig Center (330 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN).

Amiri Baraka (born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA) is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism. He is a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics.

Posted by Walt Jacobs at 3:25 PM | Permalink