Thursday, August 29
The Mbembe Milton Smith Poetry Series featuring Quraysh Ali Lansana
6:00 to 7:30 p.m.
JE Dunn Construction Theater
Free Program. Space is Limited. RSVP Required.
Click here to RSVP
This session of the Mbembe Milton Smith Poetry Series will feature Quraysh Ali Lansana. Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of 20 books in poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Lansana is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow and a visiting associate professor of English and creative writing at The University of Tulsa. He was formerly a lecturer in Africana studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa, where he also served as director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.
Lansana will be reading from his poetry collection the skin of dreams: new and selected poems. the skin of dreams is a remembering, an offering and a gathering of geographies. Traversing twenty-three years of earth and breath Quraysh Ali Lansana’s first new and collected works roadmaps small town Oklahoma to southside Chicago in compelling poems that question, surprise and dare. As a direct descendent of the Black Arts Movement and last student of Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, Lansana explores the complicated internal and external terrain of Blackness and history from a post-King, post-Kennedy childhood through the election of the first non-White president, while grappling with the definition of home. These are poems that cry, sing, scream and see.
This program was made possible by a generous grant from the Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.
