BIG READ: Writing Parents, Family, and Family Ghosts @Central Library
Gbenga Adesina will lead a poetry writing workshop on creating portraits of family members, based on Big Read and Yaa Gyasi's novel, "Homegoing." Poems will be read and discussed, writing prompts will be provided, and participants will have time to write, share their work, and receive feedback. Registration is required and seating is limited, so click the "Register Now" button today to save your spot!
Adesina, poet and essayist, received his MFA in poetry from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Poetry Fellow and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He also has a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. His poems explore themes of grief, intimacy, migration, and notions of home. They have appeared in the "Paris Review," "Harvard Review," "Guernica," "Narrative," "Yale Review," the "Best American Poetry," and the "New York Times Magazine," among other publications.
Adesina has received fellowships from the Poet's House in New York, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Colgate University, Folger Shakespeare's Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Harvard University's historic Woodberry's Poetry Room. He has won the 2020 Narrative Prize, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and other awards. He's the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, as well as co-founder and editor of "A Long House," a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature.
