CALLALOO: Celebrating 30 Years

 Hosted by the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips and Natasha Trethewey gave a special reading as part of the 30th anniversary celebration for Callaloo , the premier journal of literature, art, and culture of the African Diaspora. Founded in 1976 by editor Charles H. Rowell in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Callaloo publishes original works and critical studies of black artists and writers worldwide.

Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Neon Vernacular (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Komunyakaa is a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Carl Phillips' collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His recent collections are Quiver of Arrows and Riding Westward. Phillips is Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University.

Natasha Trethewey won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her first collection of poems, Domestic Work (2000). Since then she has published two more collections of poetry and received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard (2006). Trethewey teaches creative writing at Emory University.

Recorded On: Friday, October 26, 2007