Two fathers use poems to teach their kids about growing up black in America
by ELIZABETH FLOCK
From: PBS Newshour
When poets Geffrey Davis and F. Douglas Brown first met at a poetry retreat in 2012, they instantly connected in discussing fatherhood and the poetry that sprang from that experience. Over time, that relationship grew, and they began writing poetry that came directly out of their conversations. Soon, they were even borrowing each other’s lines or writing stanzas or whole poems back and forth, as a kind of call and response.
And in November, they published their first series of co-written poems, in a chapbook called “Begotten,” which was published by Upper Rubber books. These poems explore with tenderness and anxiety the joys and perils of being a father — especially a black father — and how to escape the mistakes of past generations.
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Steve Erickson was post-millennial long before the millennium ever got here. Like those of a Southern California Ballard or Beckett, his novels are filled with a wide variety of end of time-like calamities, both personal and political: suicide cults, alternate-history Hitlers, urban conflagrations, unpredictable weather storms and — most terrifying of all — the endlessly recurring (and continually unbelievable) presidential election cycle. Over several decades of feverish literary production (his first novel, the absorbingly recursive “Days Between Stations,” was published in 1985), he has written consistently and obsessively about people seeking a way out of their own cultural history. Sometimes they’re successful; sometimes they’re not. But one way or another, as soon as they wake up the next morning, they’re lost.
Stephen Kinzer at Vroman’s Bookstore
Join us as author Gretchen Woelfle discusses her new book Answering the Cry for Freedom: Stories of African Americans and the American Revolution. Learn about some lesser known figures of America’s past, and then participate in a craft making silhouette figures after the program.
The Teen’Scape program invites you back to work on the DIY art of writing poetry, drawing mini-comics, collaged illustration, self-publishing, and making zines.
Writing a book and looking for feedback? Need deadlines to help you reach your writing goals? Then this is group for you!
