The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature poet Cornelius Eady on Monday, Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Eady is a playwright and the author of six books of poetry, and his work also appears in many journals, magazines, and anthologies. His most recent collection of poems, "Brutal Imagination," which was a National Book Award finalist in 2001, is comprised of two cycles, the first of which is narrated largely by the black kidnapper invented by Susan Smith to cover up the killing of her two small sons. Eady's poetry, including two award-winning plays, has garnered heaps of praise from critics and readers alike.
Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell has noted that "Eady fuses headlines and history with language that is a field holler, a blues shout, a hip hop rap that combusts inside the soul and keeps on burning." Eady is co-founder, with poet Toi Derricote, of Cave Canem, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets.
The DIA Art Foundation has said that "Cornelius Eady's poems are joyous, incantatory, and experiential. [His] work is a glossary of earthly objects and human events, and his linguistic responses provide pleasure even when they are provoked by injustice, or by pain, or by loss."
The reading will be preceded by a performance by Hope College Jazz Ensemble at the Knickerbocker beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Additional information may be obtained online by visiting www.hope.edu/vws.
The Knickerbocker Theatre is located at 86 E. Eighth St.