Poet Amiri Bakara
Award-winning musician, playwright, and poet Amiri Baraka will read from his works at 8:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, at Daugherty-Palmer Commons at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Baraka is the author of “Digging: The Afro American Soul of American Classical Music,” a winner of the 31st annual American Book Awards for 2010.
Baraka also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the City College Langston Hughes Award, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, and in 2002 he was named poet laureate of New Jersey and Newark Public Schools.
In addition to his poetry and plays, Baraka is the author of numerous essays and jazz operas and the founder of the big band New Arkestra.
Refreshments will be served following the reading, part of the college’s VOICES Reading Series, which is supported in part by the Maryland Humanities Council.