In celebration of National Poetry Month, Book Beat is proud to welcome accomplished poets Bill Harris and Terry Blackhawk to the store on Thursday, April 26th at 7pm to sign and read from their latest collections. The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event, or you can purchase them via our website here and here. For more info regarding this event, contact Book Beat (248) 968-1190.
Bill Harris‘ latest book Booker T. & Them: A Blues, is a “bio-poem” considering the lives of several African Americans who sought to be men that mattered in a racist America, including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, George Washington Carver, and Jack Johnson, as he traces their effects on history and each other.
“The genius of Bill Harris has never been more evident than in Booker T & Them. This book is such a tightly woven fabric of history, biography, poetry, drama, song, sound, quotations, and definitions that the threads defy separation. We are taken on an unforgettable journey into the thoughts and experiences of Washington and some of his contemporaries their public and their secret selves as they battle racism and its apostles in various ways. Everyone who cares about justice should read this marvelously written book.” –Naomi Long Madgett, poet laureate of Detroit
Bill Harris retired as professor of English at Wayne State University in 2011 and is author of numerous plays, including Robert Johnson Trick the Devil, Stories About the Old Days, Riffs, and Coda. He is the author of three books of poetry, Birth of a Notion; Or, the Half Ain t Never Been Told (Wayne State University Press, 2009), The Ringmaster s Array, and Yardbird Suite: Side One, which won the 1997 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Harris was named the 2011 Kresge Eminent Artist by the Kresge Foundation in recognition of his professional accomplishments and community engagement.
Terry Blackhawk’s latest book of poetry is The Light Between, a collection probing beyond and through the painful dissolution of a long marriage to examine the complexities of love with bravery and delicacy. Mythical themes, elements of the natural world, and masculine/feminine polarities resonate throughout Blackhawk’s poems as she explores loss, the nature of relationships, and the integrity of the individual soul. Ultimately, The Light Between celebrates our connectedness to one another, to the planet, and to the natural world.
“The intricate progression of these poems reveals the poet at work remembering and forgetting, then forging the thrilling slippages and figurative language that can make the mind leap to a new apprehension of things.”—Natasha Trethewey on The Light Between
Terry Blackhawk is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Michigan Governor s Award for Arts Education, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. She is founding director of Detroit s acclaimed InsideOut Literary Arts Project and lives and writes not far from the river in Detroit, Michigan.