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Opal Moore
Melba Joyce Boyd
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WSU & MDW Celebrate Black History Month Special Reading March 1st Try not to miss this exquisite event featuring
three major African American writers Opal Moore, Leslie Reese and our
own Melba Joyce Boyd at The Bernath Auditorium inside The David Adamany
Undergraduate Library in the center of the Wayne State University Campus
on Wednesday March 1st at 7:00pm. The program is free and open to the
public. Opal Moore, a native Chicagoan, is an Associate Professor of English teaching fiction and poetry writing and African American literature at Spelman College in Atlanta GA. Ms. Moore is the author of Lot’s Daughters (2005). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, Connecticut Review, Honey, Hush! An Anthology of African American Women’s Humor, and Homeplaces: Stories of the South by Women Writers. Ms. Moore is a Fulbright Scholar, a Cave Canem Fellow, a Dupont Scholar, and Bellagio Fellow, and serves as a contributing editor to the “Cultural Pluralism” column which appears in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (ISU), serves as fiction editor for Obsidian III (N.C. State Univ. Press), and as contributing editor for nocturnes, a journal of experimental writing edited by poet giovanni singleton. Joining Ms. Moore will be Melba Joyce Boyd, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Wayne State University and the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Province of Literary Cats (2002), and the coeditor with M. L. Liebler of Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001. She is also the author of Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (Columbia University Press) which received the 2005 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Book Honor for Nonfiction. She has won a number of awards for her poetry including, a Michigan Council for the Arts Individual Artist Award, and was commissioned to write the official poem for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, which was inscribed in bronze in the museum wall. Lines from her poem, “We Want Our City Back,” were chiseled into the sculpture, Transcending: Michigan’s Tribute to Labor, installed in downtown Detroit. Her poetry has been translated into German, Italian, and Spanish, and has been widely published in journals and anthologies. To round out this excellent evening of poetry and art, Leslie Reese, a native Detroiter, will read from her newest collection. Her poetry and prose have been anthologized in key national collections and in major Detroit literary works. Her first poetry book, Upside Down Tapestry Mosaic History (Broadside Press), was well received and established her as an important voice in African American literature in general, and in the Detroit area in particular. Her work is highly regarded, and her second book, Urban Junkstar (Tents Press), contains work that illustrates creative depth and dexterity that exceeds most of her contemporaries. Her voice is attuned to sounds and silences of significance in the rural landscape and to the intensity and sophistication of urbanity. She has a degree in History from Alabama State University and is currently engaged in graduate studies in Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College of Arts in Chicago. |
