Poetry Reading by Robert Chrisman
Petersen Room, Allen Library
Weds April 8, 3:30-5pm
Followed by drinks in the UW Club
Sponsored by the English department Visiting Speakers Committee

Robert Chrisman is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of /The Black Scholar/,
/Journal of Black Studies and Research/, the leading journal of African-American scholarship and intellectual inquiry in the United States. Dr. Chrisman co-founded /The Black Scholar/ in 1969. Dr. Chrisman has published two volumes of poetry, /Children of Empire/ (1981) and /Minor Casualties : New and Selected Poems/ (1993). He has edited three major anthologies from /The Black Scholar: Contemporary Black Thought/ (1972), /Pan-Africanism/ (1973), and /Court of Appeal: The Black Community Speaks out on the Racial and Sexual Politics of Clarence Thomas v. Anita Hill/ (1993). He co-edited with Laurence Goldstein the anthology, /Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry/ (2001).

Dr. Chrisman has an MA in Language Arts from San Francisco State College (where he studied with Herb Blau), and a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan. He retired from a Professorship and Chair of Black Studies at University of Nebraska, Omaha, in 2005. His previous teaching includes University of Michigan, Williams College, UC Berkeley, University of Vermont, and Wayne State University.

Chrisman’s poetry is concerned with the issues of empire, both intensely personal and global. In these explorations, poems range from intense lyricism, to celebration and measured elegiac statement, to biting satire.

“Chrisman’s poignant poems speak of alienation—in families, in a world of machinery. . . There is a concurrent theme: ‘In suffering we shall find the lost garden of our grace,’ and these elegant poems do exactly that.”

- Library Journal

“Minor Casualties ranks with the very best poetic works of Robert Hayden, Melvin B. Tolson, Michael Harper, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and Jayne Cortez.”

- Andrew Salkey

“His metaphors search out the reality of social turmoil, the agony and courage of mythical and contemporary struggles for justice. He sees how the deep-rooted, historical social conscience is also a poetic vision of the measurement of personal and communal achievements.”

- James Schevill

“Revealed in this beautifully lyrical poetry is a mind’s intense desire to comprehend the limits of, and to break through the snares of an essentially Euro-Teutonic orientation into the larger world of struggling humanity: the offer the songs of fishermen, cotton choppers, can cutters and coffee pickers. . .”

- Alice Walker