Pitt News Covers University of Pittsburgh's New Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics

The Pitt News (the "independent, student-written and student-managed newspaper serving the University of Pittsburgh community") has Amanda Reed writing of the University of Pittsburgh's initiative to make their MFA program the place to study black poetry and poetics.

With the diverse faculty teaching in the program, "including three really accomplished African-American writers,” and the newly devised Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, co-founded and co-directed by Dawn Lundy Martin as "as a creative think tank for African-American and African diasporic poets and artists," that may soon be a reality.

The first of its kind, the center started out as just a possibility over round-table conversation.

Don Bialostosky, chair of the English department, took Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes and Yona Harvey out for coffee to discuss the best way to celebrate having the trio — all award-winning African-American poets — on faculty.

“In that brainstorming, I just blurted out this possibility. I said, ‘What if we were to think big, what if we were to start something like the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics?’ And then we all realized that that was the right idea,” Lundy Martin said.

Bialostosky proposed the idea at the end of the fall to John Cooper, Dean of Arts and Sciences. Cooper immediately said yes.

“We really didn’t have to make an argument,” Lundy Martin said.

Although the title is African American Poetry and Poetics, the Center covers the whole diaspora.

“African-American poetry is perhaps the most vibrant and powerful area of poetry in America today, and thinking about its poetics, the ideas that shape it, with poets and scholars both is an important opportunity to understand and to foster it,” Bialostosky said.

The Center’s faculty will help students and community members unpack black poetics’ investigations into historical, artistic and social movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Harlem Renaissance, and how they impact the present day.

“In light of recent events in Ferguson, New York and Baltimore that have once again revealed systematic police violence against African-Americans, this opportunity to offer a public venue to present the artistic engagement of poets could not be more timely or powerful,” said co-founder and co-director Hayes in a March press release for the Center’s event, “Poetry and Race in America.”

Check out the full report at Pitt News. At top: Dawn Lundy Martin. Photo by Andrew Kenower.