PRESS RELEASE
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS
COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS AND COMMUNICATION
CONTACT: Stacy Kidd, (501) 450-5390; SKidd@uca.edu
September 16, 2014
POET JERICHO BROWN TO BE IN RESIDENCE OCT. 2-3
By Briget Laskowski
UCA Department of Writing
CONWAY — As part of Conway’s annual ArtsFest and the University of Central Arkansas’s LGBT History Month, the College of Fine Arts and Communication will host the esteemed poet Jericho Brown, who will be an Artist in Residence on Oct. 2-3.
Brown is a poet and novelist whose first book, Please, won the American Book Award in 2009. Brown said the book “delves into double-edged father-son relationships, acquiring an education, historical racism, the exigencies of escape and being a gay black man in the U.S. South.”
Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.
In an article on the Poetry Society of America’s website, Brown says of his work, “I strive to be clear—not obvious. I am neither afraid of nor married to difficulty or accessibility. I mean to write poems that are felt before they are understood.”
Yusef Komunyakaa, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, says of Brown’s The New Testament, “The lyrical clarity in this poignant collection approaches ascension. And here the sacred and profane embrace. Each poem celebrates free will. Naked feeling is never abstracted, and this poet knows how to see into the dark.”
Brown will hold a reading and book signing on Oct. 2 in the College of Business Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. He will also give a craft talk, followed by a Q&A session, in Thompson Hall Room 331 on Oct. 3 at 11 a.m. Both sessions are free and open to the public and are appropriate for adult audiences. For more information, contact Stacy Kidd at SKidd@uca.edu or (501) 450-5390.
The Artist in Residence program is funded by UCA’s arts fee and is administered by the College of Fine Arts and Communication. For more information about the program, call the Office of the Dean, College of Fine Arts and Communication, at (501) 450-3293 or e-mail jdmiller@uca.edu.
The UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication includes the Departments of Art, Communication, Mass Communication and Theatre, Music and Writing. The college’s primary mission is the preparation of the next generation of artists, educators and communicators. For more information about CFAC, visit www.uca.edu/cfac or call (501) 450-3293.
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