RCAH Poetry Center's Fall Writing Series Kicks Off October 24

September 10, 2018

• Leading poets will share their work with RCAH's Center for Poetry
• Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess will join
• Locally and nationally renowned lineup

The RCAH Center for Poetry has announced its 2018 Fall Writing Series lineup, which includes locally and national renown writers and musicians Russel Brakefield, Karin Gottshall, and Sam Gleaves.

All events are free and open to the public. For more information about the 2018 Fall Writing Series, visit http://poetry.rcah.msu.edu/fall-writing-series.html.

Cindy Hunter Morgan, interim director of the Center for Poetry, said that during the 2018-2019 academic year, the the center will host some of the nation’s leading poets, who will share work that addresses disconnection and fragmentation, struggle, and resistance. This year of poetry at RCAH celebrates "Every Tongue Unfurled," a line from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess, who is one of the poets coming to campus this year.

"The RCAH Center for Poetry offers us--students, staff, faculty, community members, and people who come from some distance--to strengthen our relationship with language," said Hunter Morgan. "We all want a world that has meaning in it. We all have some experience with grief. We all want some deeper experience about what it means to be human. Poetry draws us into a different kind of attention and awareness. It reminds us what it is to be human. In poems we hear our lives"

"Poets address history directly and personally, and part of their art is in their ability to manage emotional complexity and avoid simplification," she continued. "This is the kind of art and the kind of thinking we need at Michigan State to build a healthy climate and culture. Over the course of this academic year, we're sharing opportunities for people to deepen their appreciation for the way poetry allows us to say what sometimes feels unsayable. Poetry gives us a way to ask hard questions about the challenges we face and the challenges that others face. It's about empathy, and that, in part, is what we're trying to build when we bring these poets to campus."