Join us for a night of poetry and conversation with two leading lights in the poetic new guard, Jabari Asim and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. Asim has long engaged conversations and issues regarding race in America; his book of essays We Can’t Breathe: Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. He will be reading from his debut collection of poetry Stop and Frisk: American Poems and will be in conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, former Poet Laureate of Houston, an arts activist and educator. She will be reading from her collection, Newsworthy: Poems. It is sure to be a dynamic event with provocative and defiant poetry as well as insightful conversation about what it means to be POC in 2020’s America. This event will take place via Zoom; details below.
Jabari Asim is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts and the author of seven books for adults—including We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival—and ten books for children. His poems are included in several anthologies, including Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present; Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century; and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. After more than a decade at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Washington Post, he now directs the MFA program at Emerson College.
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-recognized performance poet and the first African-American Poet Laureate of Houston. Formerly ranked #2 Female Performance Poet in the World, she is executive director of VIP Arts, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy and the arts in underserved populations. Her genre-bending poetry has engendered unconventional collaborations with groups as disparate as the Rockets and the Houston Ballet. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and the TEDx circuit. An opera for which she wrote the libretto premieres at the Houston Grand Opera in the spring of 2020.
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