Brave Testimony: African-American Poets in the 21st Century
Presented by The Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the Kelly Writers House
 Michael S. Harper |
 Natasha Tretheway |
 Toi Derricotte |
 Terrance Hayes |
 Tracie Morris |
Michael S. Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He is the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island, a term he held from 1988-1993. In 1991 he was Visiting Scholar, at large for Phi Beta Kappa, visiting nine campuses. He has published ten books of poetry, two of which were nominated for the National Book Award (1970 & 1977), Dear John, Dear Coltrane and Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems. Images of Kin won the Melville-Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America; History Is Your Own Heartbeat, 1971, won the Black Academy of Arts & Letters Award for poetry. He has edited the Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, which he selected for the National Poetry Series, 1979. He is co-editor of Chant of Saints, an anthology of African-American Art, Writing and Scholarship, and also co-editor of the "Ralph Ellison" special issue of the Carleton Miscellany, winter 1980. He was guest editor of a special issue on Robert Hayden for Obsidian, 1981. In 1990 he received the Robert Hayden Poetry Award from the United Negro College Fund. He has been honored with honorary doctorates in Letters from Trinity College (Hartford, CT), Coe College (Cedar Rapids, LA), Notre Dame College (Manchester, NH), Kenyon College (Gambier, OH). He is co-editor of Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1995. Bowdoin College hosted the "Celebrating Harper" Festival from October 24th through the 27th in 1996. He is the winner of the George Kent Poetry Award, 1996, presented by Gwendolyn Brooks for Honorable Amendments, and the Claiborne Pell Award for excellence in the Arts, in 1997.
Natasha Tretheway, an assistant professor of English at Auburn University, is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2000, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her first book, Domestic Work (Graywolf 2000), won the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Currently, she is a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.
Toi Derricotte, born in Detroit, Michigan, has published four books of poetry and a memoir. Her latest book, Tender (University of Pittsburgh Press), received the Paterson Poetry Prize for 1998. Her memoir, The Black Notebooks, published in 1997, was chosen by the New York Times to be a notable book of the year. It received the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award in Non-Fiction in 1998, and the Anisfield-Woolf Book Award for non-fiction from the Cleveland Foundation, under the judgement of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rita Dove, Stephen Jay Gould, Joyce Carol Oates, and Simon Schama. It was also nominated for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Her second book, Natural Birth, was republished by Firebrand Press in February 2000. To quote Sharon Olds: "This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American Poetry today." Among her many honors and awards, Toi is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1985, 1990) recipient of the United Black Artists USA Incorporated Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and two Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught in the graduate creative writing programs at NYU, George Mason University, Old Dominion University, and Mills College. She has been a workshop leader at many summer writing workshops throughout the country, including Breadloaf and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. In 1999-2000 she was the Delta Sigma Theta endowed chair of Poetry at Xavier. She is the co-founder of Cave Canem, the historic workshop retreat for African-American poets.
Terrance Hayes' debut collection, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999) won both a Whiting Writers award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and has received favorable reviews in the Washington Post Book World, Black Issues Book Review, and various other literary journals. One of his new poems was selected from the Poem Finder Online Database of 50,000 full text poems to be among the best published last year. Other poems have recently appeared in Harvard Review, Chelsea, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review and in numerous anthologies of emerging writers, including Kevin Powell's Steps into a World: A Global Anthology of The New Black Literature. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he lives with his wife, poet Yona Harvey, and their daughter, Ua Pilar.
Tracie Morris is a multi-disciplinary performance poet who has worked in theatre, dance, music, and film. She has toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Primarily known as a musical poet, Tracie has worked with an extensive range of artists including Donald Byrd, Graham Haynes, Melvin Gibbs, Mark Batson, Leon Parker, Vernon Reid, DD Jackson, Cecilia Smith, The Oliver Lake Quintet and the David Murray Big Band. Tracie's poetry has been extensively anthologized in literary magazines, newspapers, and books including 360 Degrees: A Revolution of Black Poets, Listen Up!, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Soul. Her words have also been featured in commissioned pieces for several organizations including Aaron Davis Hall, the International Festival for the Arts, The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace and Yale Repertory Theatre for choreographer Ralph Lemon. Tracie has participated in over a dozen recording projects to date. She is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Creative Capital Fellowship, the National Haiku Slam championship and an Asian Cultural Council Gellowship. She is the author of two poetry collections, Intermission and Chap-T-her Won. In addition to being a working artist, Ms. Morris teaches performance poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.