FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jamol Lettman at (860) 796-9722 or jamol.lettman@uconn.edu
Aetna Writer-in-Residence event: award-winning poet Jericho Brown to read at the University of Connecticut
The University of Connecticut’s Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce that poet Jericho Brown will read at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8, 2016, at the UConn Co-op, Storrs Center.
Shreveport, Louisiana native Jericho Brown graduated from Dillard University, received his MFA from the University of New Orleans, and his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta.
Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2009 he won the Whiting Award as well as the American Book Award for his collect of poems titled Please. His second book The New Testament(2014) won the Ansfield-Wolf Book award and was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. A few of the publications that have published Brown’s poetry are Post Road Magazine, American Poetry Review, jubilat, and A Public Space.
Publishers Weekly said that in his book The New Testament, “Brown employs the rhythms of sexuality and spirituality to protest oppression.” Craig Morgan Teicher of NPR professed that Brown’s poems “attest deeply to the view from inside of the kind of everyday racial profiling that allowed Ferguson to blow up. What's most remarkable in these poems is that, while they never stop speaking through gritted teeth, never quite make the choice between hope and fear, they are always beautiful, full of a music that is a cross between the sinuous sentences of Carl Phillips, the forceful descriptions of Mark Doty, and hip rhythms of Terrance Hayes.”
The Aetna Visiting Writer-in-Residence program began in 2003 and is supported by funding from the Aetna Chair in Writing, which enables UConn to extend invitations for a residency on campus to critically acclaimed authors and poets. Each guest spends two days on campus, where he or she holds Question and Answer sessions with the campus community, offers tutorials for interested students, and gives a public reading of excerpts from his or her work. Past Aetna Writers-in-Residence include have included Laura van den Berg, Camille Dungy, Jo-Ann Mapson, Eduardo C. Corral, and Andre Dubus III to name a few.
The Creative Writing Program aims to introduce and engage both undergraduate and graduate students in various writing courses including fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, drama, screenwriting, and more. These courses are offered to students of all majors in order to engage and include all that are interested in joining this growing creative writing community at the University of Connecticut.
The reading, co-sponsored by the Aetna Chair of Writing, the UConn Creative Writing Program and the UConn Co-Op, is free and open to the public. The UConn Co-op is located at One Royce Circle, 101 Storrs Center, and can be contacted at 860-486-8525. For more information, please visit the Creative Writing Program’s website at www.creativewriting.uconn.edu.
For more information, contact: Jamol Lettman at jamollettman@gmail.com