JOHN F. EBERHARDT MEMORIAL LECTURE, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Jericho Brown: Love Poems No Matter What!

MON SEP 28, 7:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall (and online via Crowdcast)

It is difficult to speak of any impulse toward the spiritual in literature.  Readers and writers are—and should be—skeptical of any framework that purports a clear divide between good and evil.  We are compelled, exhorted, and trained to discover and to create worlds that are as complex as the lives we live.  And it is particularly difficult to think for too long about our souls in a nation where religion is still used as an excuse for committing violent evils and for the normalization of these evils.  We all find ourselves putting words on paper that seem to come to us as if we were overhearing them…as if there were another voice or some other voices in the room.  If a good writing day is one where we most intently listen, then who do we think is talking?

Jericho Brown is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University. Aside from winning the Pulitzer Prize, The Tradition was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors include the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.