What: Authors Series: Fourth Annual NOMMO African American Authors Series: Sponsored by the Givens Foundation for African American Literature and the Friends of the University of Minnesota Libraries
Where: Cowles Auditorium, Hubert H. Humphrey Center
When: All events begin at 7:30 p.m. Dates detailed below.
Tickets available through Northrop Ticket Office: Each event: $10
Complimentary tickets available for U of M students and members of the Friends of the University of Minnesota Libraries

Order tickets:

• By phone: Call the Northorp Ticket Office at 612-624-2345 and purchase your tickets using a major credit card


• In person: Northrop Ticket Office is open Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and is located at 105 Northrop Auditorium, 84 Church Street S.E., Mpls, 55455


• On the web: www.tickets.umn.edu
  Complimentary tickets must be obtained by phone or in person at Northrop Ticket Office.

In this series, host and moderator Alexs Pate, University of Minnesota professor and author of Amistad, takes you on a journey into the consciousness of three luminary writers. These dynamic events feature the authors reading from their work and engaging in spirited dialogue with Pate about the state of the art of African American literature.

February 7, 2008: Randall Kenan
Randall Kenan is among today's best non-fiction writers and also a fabulist of our times. His acclaimed book The Fire This Time is his response, 45 years later, to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, one of the essential and galvanizing books of the American Civil Rights Movement. His short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead was nominated for the LA Times Book Award for Fiction, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award.

April 24, 2008: Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is among the most beloved and respected figures in American poetry today, widely acclaimed for her powerful explorations of race, womanhood, spirituality, and mortality. She is also an acclaimed children's author. Her poetry collections include Mercy, Blessing the Boats, An Ordinary Woman, and Good Times, which was listed as one of the New York Times 10 best books in 1969. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and two Pulitzer Prize nominations.

April 30, 2008: Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka is the controversial and iconoclastic author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music criticism, inluding The Essence of Reparations, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, and the Obie Award-winning play Dutchman. He is also a revolutionary political activist and founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s. His creative and critical work is groundbreaking in its exploration of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination, and national and human liberation. He is the recipient of an American Book Award and the prestigious Langston Hughes Award.