blues

Michael S. Harper reads from across his first four books, all published in the years shortly before this reading: Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970), History Is Your Own Heartbeat (1971), Song: I Want a Witness (1972), and Debridement (1973). Harper shares poems that delve into the loss of children, racial inequality, and the Vietnam War, mixing them with poems that express his love for his wife and family.

Ishmael Reed performs poems from his extensive body of work, including several unpublished poems. He remarks that his reading will "start out with a song and end with a song"--that is, with his poems "Betty's Ball Blues" and "I'm Running for the Office of Love" as set to music by Taj Mahal and Allen Toussaint.

Donald Justice performs poems published between 1973 and 1987. The first two sections from his poetic sequence My South are read and introduced with titles that differ from those that appear in the 1987 collection The Sunset Maker.

Al Young reads poems from The Blues Don't Change (1982) and Heaven: Collected Poems 1956-1990 (1992), along with several prose selections.

Geraldine Connolly reads poems informed by sense of place, particularly Montana, in a performance for the Tucson Festival of Books.

Gary Copeland Lilley reads from The Subsequent Blues (2004). This reading was originally given with Brenda Shaughnessy and David Dominguez.

Al Young reads from Drowning in the Sea of Love: Musical Memoirs (1995), Heaven: Collected Poems 1956-1990 (1992), and The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000 (2001).

In this performance for the Writers at Work Series, Katherine Toy Miller and Vance Bourjaily read from their fiction. Katherine Toy Miller reads six short stories from a collection titled Eleanor, along with a short story titled "The Critical Session." Vance Bourjaily reads segments from a novel-in-progress called The Great Fake Book. Bourjaily ends his reading by performing a short solo on the cornet.