S126.
Readings From Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Reimagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters
Saturday, February 10, 2024
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Reimagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (fall 2023) edited by Danielle Legros Georges and Artress Bethany White represents a celebration and reconsideration of Wheatley’s eighteenth-century poems by twenty award-winning Black contemporary poets. This anthology, meant to enhance the poet’s legacy for today’s readers, contains a selection of Wheatley Peters’s original poems, translations/re-inscriptions of those poems, and a short reflective essay by each poet.
Participants
Artress Bethany White is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University. She is the author of the Trio award-winning poetry collection My Afmerica: Poems. Her book Survivor's Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity received a 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award.
Danielle Legros Georges is a poet, essayist, translator, and professor emeritus at Lesley University. She was appointed the second poet laureate of the city of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019. Her most recent work is a book of translations, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert.
Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and Arc & Hue. Tara currently teaches at DePaul University and is the poetry editor at the Langston Hughes Review.
Kiki Petrosino is professor of poetry at the University of Virginia. She is the author of four books of poetry, including White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia and Witch Wife. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature.
Evie Shockley’s poetry books include semiautomatic (Pulitzer Prize finalist), the new black (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award winner) and, most recently, suddenly we. Her book of criticism is Renegade Poetics. She is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
