Quote of the Day

Ted Cruz’s announcement of his preferred running mate has enhanced the nomination process by giving voters pertinent information. They already know the only important thing about Trump’s choice: His running mate will be unqualified for high office because he or she will think Trump is qualified.

 - George Will
The Washington Post

Mayday! Mayday!

One can see a significant change in the DC local homeless problem. It appears homeless people are now building encampments or becoming "human barnacles" attached to the outside of existing businesses. At night some of our streets can remind one of photographs once found in old issues of National Geographic Magazine. District of Calcutta? Today we are confronted with "pus poverty" an outcome of a sick society. Income equality is a clinical way of explaining greed. If we are not careful we will walk pass our fellow human beings no longer mobile with their pushcarts - instead they have arrived at their final destinations. They have stopped searching and seeking shelter, their worn clothes, torn by the smell of their street days are slowly becoming invisible to our eyes. We have returned to living behind veils as if a curtain just fell on life's stage. After gentrification comes a tale of two cities and the story of how we died not once but twice. We died in the arms of strangers, we died looking into mirrors, we died wishing there was a change in the weather. Summer is coming. I fear a dark, dank coldness, linked to our own climate change and indifference. I fear we have all become sufferers.

AWP NEWS

https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_news_view/4011/e._ethelbert_miller_receives_2016_george_garrett_award

LINK TO THE HISTORYMAKERS:


http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/e-ethelbert-miller-41

THE ALDON NIELSEN PROJECT 2015

MAPPING THE OUTER LIMITS

E. Ethelbert Miller - The Aldon Nielsen Project # 18

Q:  In WHAT I SAY one finds the poets presented in alphabetical order. I felt your book didn't explain what the various writers had in common. Why didn't you arrange the book around issues of theme and structure?  I'm a substitute high school or college teacher and the class is studying the poetry of Julie Ezelle Patton. Where do I begin?  If she defines herself as a conceptual artist what boundaries is she crossing when it comes to poetry?

In the end, the decision to arrange the contents of both What I Say and Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone alphabetically by poets’ last names was a choice rooted in a desire to leave readers free to pursue their own mappings through the era (roughly 1948 to now) that the two anthologies carved out. We could easily have gone many other routes, and even toyed with the idea of a random positioning. (At least I toyed with that idea; not sure today that I ever shared the thought with my co-editor, Lauri Ramey.)

Some quick background: for many years, readers of my book Black Chant had been encouraging me to publish an anthology of the poetry that I had discussed in that volume, a volume dedicated to exploring a territory within African American poetry that had gotten somewhat sidelined in the decades after the Black Arts Movement. One of the many striking things about the Black Power and revolutionary years of, say, 1965-1975, was that so many writers, and especially poets, had been at the forefront of the movements, But even in the years leading up to the Black Arts period, many of the African American poetry anthologies had been truly eclectic in scope, attempting to represent the broad aesthetic range of Black verse in America. You can find prose poems in anthologies as early as the 1920s, for instance. At the high water mark of 60s/70s anthologizing, this phenomenon was if anything yet more pronounced. It was in anthologies that I first read the works of such poets as Russell Atkins, Tom Weatherly, Elouise Loftin, Jay Wright, June Jordan and so on and on. With the waning of the Revolutionary 60s/70s, there was an observable decrease in the mainstream publishing of Black poetry anthologies, though many smaller presses kept up the pace. As the 80s came along, the strengthening multicultural reform movements in universities again spurred commercial publishers’ interest in supplying a growing market for classroom texts and the general market. But a funny thing happened; many of the new anthologies struck me as being considerably narrower in their aesthetic choices than had books I’d read in my youth such as Baraka and Neal’s Black Fire. Among the many things I set out to do in writing Black Chant was to historicize the intellectual fashions that had led to the marginalization of poetry in general and more aesthetically radical poetry in particular. Many among my small audience of readers wanted to have a collection they could use in their own work and teaching that was more nearly representative of African American poetry that was as radical in the writing itself as it was in its thematics. (Think Baraka! Think Lorenzo Thomas.) So there was no surprise in the urgings I was hearing towards an editorial project.

But there were material concerns. Chief among them was the fact that for so many of those years I was teaching a 4/4 load and had no access to research funds or research assistants. (There was also the fact I’d already observed that it was probably wiser to wait till I was tenured to take on a time-consuming editing task that, for all its obvious value to readers and to scholarship, would count for little in a tenure case.)

These were among the factors I was outlining to Lauri Ramey the day she first phoned me from Hampton University to chat, and suggested the need for such an anthology. Her immediate response was, “I’ll help you.”

So that’s how we got to the project in the first place, a story I have been telling at panels and readings in support of our second volume, What I Say. We have been as clear as we could be throughout the project that we are aware that others could easily chart a different course through the same history. Some times this was not by our own choice. (It still pains me that there is nothing from Jay Wright or Julia Fields in our first collection, but they each, for different reasons, didn’t care to be anthologized further at the moment. Similarly, I keep thinking that if I had delayed finalizing What I Say just a few months longer [it had already been years, mostly due to my commuting life mode] we could have included Tonya Foster, LaTasha Diggs and others.) Many will look at the word “innovative” in our subtitles and immediately think of poets they would have added under that rubric. If anything, my response is to hope that they will. We need more such books. One place to look for an alternate reading of things is the dossier of radical poets prepared for the journal boundary 2 by Dawn Lundy Martin just last year.

In the end, the alphabetical organization was our way of encouraging readers to come to their own conclusions about lineages and affiliations. This doesn’t always turn out as I would have it. In our short preface to What I Say we mention the fact that a few of the poets in that book had friendships with various of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. I’ve observed in the few months since the book appeared that some people introducing our work at conferences and readings have a tendency to highlight that fact, somewhat obscuring our book’s evidence of the many routes that different poets took to the experimental modes visible and audible in their works. In the many decades since Grove Press published Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry anthology, many critics have argued with the implementation of his geographical groupings of the poets therein.  One Amazon reviewer of Ron Silliman’s collection In the American Tree reacted to that book’s organization, writing “I think in my copy I crossed out the words West and East in the book and wrote above them ‘Us’ and ‘Them.’” On the other hand, chronological arrangements (most often organizing by the poets’ dates of birth) struck me as entirely too likely in this case to present a false picture of a ceratin “progress.” Thematic arrangements can often be productive, but generally this is true when the anthology itself is built around a particular set of subject matters, rather than, as in our case, built around the desire to assert an important continuing history of experiment. I don’t know that I have seen many anthologies built around particular structures, unless we’re thinking of things like sonnet collections, or haiku anthologies. Part of the point of our books is to underscore the continuous generation of new forms. And yes, as editors we could have produced a much longer explanatory introduction, but I have an aversion to repeating arguments that I have made in print already, an aversion that comes from having had so many editors over the years encourage me to say again what I have already said, when what I want to say is something else. (Those who have not yet seen What I Say can look forward to its wonderful introductory essay on the subject of anthologizing by poet C.S. Giscombe.) And I know it’s something of an evasion to advise people who want to know what all these poets have in common to go read Black Chant and Integral Music, and the many essays I’ve published since . . .

But here’s the nutshell, already burst, the contents escaping in all directions.

The poets presented in these two anthologies have in common their participation in the ongoing aesthetic rupture that shows up in poetry with Modernism.  Now, experience teaches me that some will read that and rush to the same sort of mistake as those who overemphasize the role of White experimentalists (or even White mentalists) in these developments.

Here’s the thing, as we say nowadays, relatable, in fact.  I follow C.L.R. James and W.E.B. DuBois in making the argument that the peoples of the African diaspora were not just subjects of Modernism, not simply inspiration for so many of Modernism’s breakthroughs, but were demonstrably producers of Modernism, even, as DuBois and James teach us, the very condition of possibility for the emergence of Modernity as a historical fact.

So, yes, we can read Amiri Baraka telling us of his early readings in Joyce, Eliot, Beckett, cummings, Yeats etc.  But what sort of readers would we be if we overlooked the equal importance in his evolution of Langston Hughes, of James Weldon Johnson (author, in my view, of the first Modernist novel by an African American author), and of all those preachers he heard in his parents’ church? We’d be, sad to say, the kind of readers who have written so many essays overlooking just that lineage.

What the poets in our anthologies have in common, then, is Williams (William Carlos), Hughes, Olson, Johnson, Moore, Césaire, Lorca, Senghor, and let’s not forget the poetics of Armstrong, Ellington, Williams (Mary Lou), Monk,  Coltrane, Ayler . . .

These poets are not the only ones who have read, listened to and been influenced by this lineage, but for these poets these predecessor artists are not just subject matter and inspiration.  Williams revised the adage about art being nature’s mirror by urging us to see what the poet does as not copying nature, but doing what nature does, bringing new things into being. Césaire represented his people, but his poetry was no simple act of representation.

Terms like “MFA” poetry are clearly an unsatisfactory shorthand. We could substitute terms like “mainstream poetry,” “AWP poetry,” “official verse culture.” Back at the time of Allen’s New American Poetry it was common to divide the poets into the academic and its anti-, but those were terms describing styles of writing, not the professional locus of the poets themselves, or even their level of scholarly learning. Any of these terms must be written under erasure. For example, both mainstream MFA programs around the country and the AWP itself are clearly more welcoming of the more radical poetries now than they were in earlier years. (For so much of the 80s and 90s, the AWP newsletter seemed to be on a campaign against poststructuralism AND cultural Studies AND surrealism and its rapidly proliferating offspring.) At this past AWP conference in Los Angeles, there was a panel celebrating Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen gave a reading, and there was even a What I Say panel. A few poet/editors have tried to float terms such as “hybrid verse” or “post-avant” to signal this greater mainstream receptiveness – But all you have to do is look at the way postmodern visual art is now enshrined in major museums and then look to the rewards structure of the American poetry community (the MacArthurs are a good place to see this) to recognize that when it comes to America’s poetry culture, there is very much still a mainstream, with its describable and preferred poetics.

And I think this is demonstrated, too, by the fact that so many years had passed since we’d last seen anthologies that did the work of these two books. Ken Burns did the neat trick in his Jazz series of pairing onscreen diminutions of the achievements of Ornette Coleman with a CD series that sold Ornette Coleman. Similarly, while nobody, I trust, would think of publishing something that announced itself as an encompassing anthology of contemporary African American verse without including the work of Baraka, they mostly don’t include Russell Atkins or Julie Patton.

As to teaching Patton, our anthology is a good starting point, as you might not run into her work too many other places. But even our book has its drawbacks.  Patton’s long poetic tribute to Baraka should have been in color. We simply had no money for publishing color plates. What we did publish affords an opportunity for students to confront not only the oral tradition in Black verse, but also the unpronounceable in Black verse. Beyond giving students a reason to think carefully about the relationships between the soundings of poetry and the visual forms in which it appears, Patton also calls for us to rethink our understandings of performance. Mention “performance poetry” in most contexts and everybody will think of slams and open mic nights. But how often does a Julie Patton appear at an open mic among all the emoters taking their cues from people who took their cues from Def Poetry Jam? What has happened is that too many take nothing more than the attitude and delivery mode from what they’ve seen of the Black Arts, and don’t go to school with the revolution in verse that accompanied the political revolution. There will soon be an example of Julie Patton in performance online, drawn from the publication reading for What I Say that took place at Cal State LA’s new downtown campus during AWP. The audience never knows what Patton is going to do when she approaches a microphone, not even audiences that have been to her gallery shows or have seen her with a band. On the night of the reading in LA, she began by making a few opening comments; next thing we knew she was singing a complex (unheard of?) improvisation that made music from the names of other poets in the book, addressed individuals sitting in the audience, even incorporated a bit of the epic piece by her that’s in the anthology. Performances like that demand that we attend to this as an art form that belongs in the ranks with our greatest page poets. Given the long history we have with being able to speak intelligently about Sonia Sanchez’s improvisations, Jayne Cortez’s superrealism, Ntozake Shange’s choreo-poems, Sun Ra’s chants, can it really be that difficult to comprehend a multimedia poet of the stature of Patton? At the same time, should not Patton’s work cause some disturbance in the field of poetic conceptualism as it is currently constituted?  In the last year there has been a raging controversy surrounding racism and the works of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, leading lights in what is presently termed conceptual poetry, and yet that terming has a bad case of presentism. The debates have gone on as though no Black artists had ever been involved in conceptualism – No Adrienne Piper, let along Mendi and Keith Obadike, and certainly no Julie Patton. Patton’s work not only interrupts standard conversations around the boundaries of verse, it reconceives the conceptual itself.,

But the bottom line for What I Say is, as it was for Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, found in the work itself. It is often said that “experimental poetry” teaches you to read it as you read. These two anthologies are open to myriad openings of pathways through the territories, and each pathway reveals another turning in the question of what these poets have in common, and what we have in common with them, a certain way, as Giscombe has it, of complicating the yakety yak.

POETRY NEWS FROM TERI CROSS DAVIS

Teri Cross Davis

Poetry Coordinator

Folger Shakespeare Library

201 East Capitol Street, S.E.

Washington DC, 20003

(p)202.675.0374

(f)202.608.1719

www.folger.edu/poetry

O.B. Hardison Poetry Series 2015/16

Embrace the Night

Folger Poetry Board Reading

Sir Andrew Motion

Mon. May 9         7:30pm

Lineage: From the Black Arts Movement to Cave Canem

Mon. June 13        5:30pm- 9:30pm

5:30- 6:45pm Cave Canem Open Mic featuring fellows Robin Coste Lewis, Joel Dias-Porter, Kamilah Aisha Moon and more with Derrick Weston Brown, moderating.

7:30- 8:30pm Reading and discussion with Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez, Kwame Alexander moderating.

8:30-9:30pm Cave Canem co-founder Toi Derricotte, Gregory Pardlo, Kyle Dargan, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

 

THE NBA OF LIFE

Curry and now Chris Paul injured during the NBA playoffs.  Nothing should ever be taken for granted. Games like life are filled with disappointments and constant surprise. We wake to earthquakes.

I want to tell you everything I know about being alive but I
missed a lot of living that way -

   Marie Howe (The Kingdom of Ordinary Time)

Martín Espada

Listen to Audio Podcast (28:43 minutes)
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), and Alabanza (2003). His honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Quote of the Day

Every historical inquiry has a saturation point, past which new inquiry becomes simply old inquiry repackaged...

  - Adam Gopink, The New Yorker, April 25, 2016

Well, I'm back from New York.  On Wednesday I gave a reading at The New School. On the program were Jarita Davis and Camille Rankine. The event was sponsored by Cave Canem. I thought it went well. A number of old friends in the audience.

Grace was kind enough to rent a car and take me to Yonkers to see my sister.  Sad to see her condition. We lose our minds so quickly. I need to write about this before my own mind falls apart. I see it coming. Time to prepare for the end.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK...Bert back in the City.

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April 20, 6:30 pm
New Works Reading: Jarita Davis, Camille Rankine and E. Ethelbert Miller
Join us for an exciting evening of poetry with fellow Jarita Davis and Cave Canem friends Camille Rankine and E. Ethelbert Miller. Davis is a former Writer-in-Residence at the Nantucket Historical Association and author of Return Flights (Tagus, March 2016). Rankine’s debut full-length collection is Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper Canyon, 2016), described by Stephen Burt as “sensuously immediate . . . and trailing—with fearful eagerness—the spirit of Plath.” Miller is the author or editor of many books, including the memoirs The 5th Inning and Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer. The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller is forthcoming from Willow Books in spring 2016. Free and open to the public. Book signing to follow.
The New School
Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang College
65 West 11th Street
Room B500
New York, NY 10003

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The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, est. 1961

Issue 119 - Afro-Asian Worlds

Transition 119, "Afro-Asian Worlds" examines historical and contemporary moments of cultural encounter in communities on the Indian Ocean and to the East; from Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania to China. Guest Editor Krishna Lewis presents a glimpse of cross cultural interaction in these spaces.  M. G. Vassanji contemplates otherness in his childhood home of Dar es Salaam and how he found his way to writing "his" city. Anthropologist Jatin Dua investigates maritime culture and the unexpectedly congenial interactions between pirates and hostages in Bosaso and other ports. Bill V. Mullen reflects on politics and creativity in the life and work of late, legendary afro-asian jazz musician, Fred Ho. The issue also highlights activism in its various forms, featuring insights from multiple generations of civil rights leaders in St. Louis, Missouri, including Percy Green, Tef Poe, and Jamala Rogers; startling statistics about the history of solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system in an essay by Adam Ewing; and Francis Nenik's portrait of undersung South African poet and activist, Edward Vincent Swart. In addition to powerful poetry and fiction by Bryan Washington and Desiree Bailey, Issue 119 revives Transition's infamous Letters section, giving our readers a forum for voicing opinions and responses. Read the issue on JSTOR, Project Muse, or order from IUP! Issue 119 Artists 119 Featured Article Generations of Struggle Activists and scholars Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, George Lipsitz, and Jamala Rogers with Elizabeth Hinton discuss more than five decades of black action in St. Louis, from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter. "If you're going to come into one of these communities where there's black folks, and you're going to pull your gun out and shoot, you will be met with resistance. We're going to curse at you. We're going to throw some stuff at you. We might even tip over a police car or two, depending on how we feel that day. But you will not just come into our communities and gun people down and be met with nothing." - Tef Poe Read Generations of Struggle (a full transcript of this conversation will appear in Kalfou later this spring).

Alejandro de la Fuente, Editor Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Visual Arts Editor Sara Bruya, Managing Editor Nicole Terez Dutton, Editorial Assistant Laura Correa Ochoa, Amanda Fish, Mariam Goshadze, Student Associate Editors

Transition Store | Website | Order: 800-842-6796

HEY JOE!

Dear All: 

I hope this email finds you all well. 

If you haven't RSVP'd yet, this is a reminder that you are all invited to our Member's-Only Reception this Thursday, April 14, from 5:30-7:30 PM, at The Writer's Center, prior to Ethelbert's 40th Anniversary Reading. 

Stay for his reading at 7:30 PM, which will feature a moderated conversation with News4 anchor Wendy Rieger, who is an enthusiastic fan of Ethelbert's work.

Contact genevieve.deleon@writer.org with any questions or concerns you may have. We look forward to seeing you!

Sincerely,

Joe

--

Joe Callahan, CFRE
Executive Director
The Writer's Center
4508 Walsh Street Bethesda, MD 20815t: 301.654.8664 x203 f: 240.223.0458
e: joe.callahan@writer.org  w: Writer.org 

It was June (Jordan) who introduced me to the music of Gato Barbieri.  How often did I listen to his album - Caliente?  Music is what we need to keep the memories warm. Barbieri died a few days ago.

It's difficult to read or listen to current social and political commentary. We keep going in the same circles.  Where are the prophets for a new day?  Look for two-sided dumbness to emerge at both the Republican and Democratic conventions this year. Some young people will arm themselves with rhetorical muskets. Look to the Left or Right Wing and one sees a plane descending. Pilot, Pilot, help us restore the civility we've seen to have lost. After Obama one can only pray for a Larry Doby.

Time to get back to writing E-Notes and not simply posting information. Too many things happening in my life right now but no excuses.

Trying to help my sister keep the darkness away. Helpless in DC.
Pushing myself to do more - clock ticking.
How many years left?
I'm happy The Collected Poems...is out there. The book will either be praised or ignored.
I'm not expecting too much.

2016 continues to be a year of transition and transformation; as well as a rite of passage.

View it in your browser.

Excerpts from the 2016 PEN Open Book Award Shortlist Looking to diversify your reading list? Check out poetry, non-fiction, and memoir from Rick Barot, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Vievee Francis, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and Lauret Savoy. The winner will be announced live at the PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on April 11. Read the excerpts » INTERVIEW The PEN Ten with Yuri Herrera We speak to acclaimed Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera, whose latest two novels are out or forthcoming from And Other Stories. He'll be participating in four events on Mexico at the 2016 PEN World Voices Festival. Read more » PEN POETRY SERIES A Brief Account of Several Art Events and Other Horrifying Experiences I think my neighbor is a narco. I get / scared // he’ll find out I’m suspicious of him. The other day I received / an anonymous letter saying: / “We have paved the way of extreme hardship.” // The other day / I received an anonymous letter saying: / “Spilt blood / confers a property right.”Read more » RECOMMENDED READING The Book Report: Jeff Shotts Graywolf Press Executive Editor Jeff Shotts on why it's an exciting moment for contemporary American poetry, and the five poetry collections he turns to again and again. Read more » EVENT Finalists Reading: Debut Fiction from the 2016 PEN Literary Awards Sun., April 10, 7:00pm KGB Bar, 85 East 4th St, New York, NY Join us for an evening of celebration as the finalists of the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize Mia Alvar, Angela Flournoy, Julie Iromuanya, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Jennifer Tseng read excerpts from their books. RSVP »

In partnership with the Library of Congress, Poet Lore presents An Evening of Uruguayan Poetry with Jesse Lee Kercheval Thursday, May 12 6:30 PM at Montpelier Room, James Madison Building Library of Congressin Washington, DC Poet and translator Jesse Lee Kercheval will read fromthe selections of Idea Vilariño's poetry featured in Poet Lore's Spring/Summer 2016 issue as well as translations of several noteworthy Uruguayan female poets.  RSVP on Facebook (optional)

Jenny McKean Moore Series: A Reading by Claudia Rankine

Join us for the next installment of The Jenny McKean Moore Reading Series featuring Claudia Rankine, who will read from new book Citizen: An American Lyric. Her new work won both the PEN Open Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Award.

Rankine is the recipient of the Poets and Writers Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. A poet, essayist, playwright, and editor, she is the Chancellor of American Poets and the Aerol Arnold Chair in the University of Southern California English Department. Rankine has published five collections of poetry, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Si Toi Aussi Tu M'abandonnes, The End of the Alphabet, Plot, and Nothing In Nature Is Private. Her two plays are entitled Provenance of Beauty and Existing Conditions.
Greywolf Press describes Citizen as follows:

Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
           

Event Date and Time: 

Monday, April 11, 2016 - 7:30pm

Event Location: 

Gelman Library, Room 702

  

Application Open for June Master Class

Monday, June 13, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM
FROM THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT TO CAVE CANEM
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Black Arts Movement and the 20th anniversary of Cave Canem, a day-long symposium featuring two panels and a master class in children’s literature. Evening readings to follow at the Folger Shakespeare Theater. This event is co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Kluge Center, the Folger Shakespeare Theater, PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and Cave Canem Foundation.
Location: LJ-119, First floor, Thomas Jefferson Building
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Application open now. Click here to apply.

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Look for It! April is Jazz Appreciation Month and Duke Ellington's Birthday month. #EllingtonDC #ESUdc Films that begin conversations about bridging divisions to reach common ground. @PeaceOfficerdoc @ArmortheFilm @TomBradleydoc Share Tweet Forward +1 Share Pin Celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month and Duke Ellington's Birthday (April 29th). Enjoy food and stories about the musicians and music conmmunity that inspired Ellington's “Irresistable Jass!” and his legacy in the U Street and Shaw neighborhoods while supporting the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Purchase tickets on Eventbrite - https://ellingtonbdaytour-apr17.eventbrite.com Get a 10% discount with promo code Michon Boston Group Friend.