SEEING OURSELVES IN THE RIVER, IN THE MIRROR, IN THE WORLD

Spend your afternoon with two exciting award-winning authors--Joy Jones and E. Ethelbert Miller--sharing their stories about becoming writers in the nation's capital: the struggles, the adventures, the triumphs. Also visit the historical exhibition that introduces you to other authors who lived and worked in DC during the late 1960s through the present.

SEEING OURSELVES IN THE RIVER, IN THE MIRROR, IN THE WORLD, is the touring program of African Americans and Children's Literature: An Exploration of How DC's Black Writers Contributed to Canon and Community. The program kicked off on March 2, with an unprecedented daylong symposium funded by a major grant from Humanities DC.

Now it continues with more intimate conversations that allow the authors to get closer to the audience, sharing more details about themselves and their writings.

E. ETHELBERT MILLER's will present “From the Diary of A Negro Volunteer: How Eugene E. Miller became E. Ethelbert Miller during the DC Years of our Lord 1968-1976.”

A a literary activist, Miller is the author of two memoirs and several collections of poetry. He hosts the WPFW-FM Thursday morning radio show, On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller, and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. He is associate editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin presented Miller with a congressional award in 2020 in recognition of his literary activism. In 2022, he received the Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Peace and Justice Studies Association. The next year, Miller was named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. For 40 years Miller served as the director of Howard University's Afro-American Resource Center, touching the lives of hundreds of established writers of color, particularly African Americans, while serving as mentor for some of the country most well known literary and cultural leaders.

Ethelbert’s latest book is How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask (City Point Press).

JOY JONES is a popular speaker, trainer, and author of several books for adults and children. She, too, will provide insight into her development.

Her most recent are Fearless Public Speaking, a how-to for teens, and Jayla Jumps In, a novel that received a starred review on Booklist and was chosen as one of the best sports books for children by the American Library Association. Her novel in progress, Walking the Boomerang, won the 2022 Pen America/ Phyllis Naylor Grant for Children's and Young Adult Novelists. Joy's next book is The Sky Is Not Blue which debuts Summer 2024. She works for the DC Public Library.

NOT ONLY IS THIS A PROPER WAY TO CELEBRATE POETRY MONTH, IT IS A PERFECT WAY TO SPEND A SATURDAY AFTERNOON AND LEARN ABOUT DC'S RICH LITERARY HISTORY.

Register Now!

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

3310 Connecticut Ave NW, 3310 Connecticut Avenue Northwest, Washington, United States