Imani Perry speaks in Just Buffalo’s BABEL Series, Marcus Jackson reads at Canisius, and Pure Ink Poetry presents Lyric + Verse. All that and more this week.

Tuesday, April 21, 7 p.m.: The Canisius College Contemporary Writers Series will present a reading by and question-and-answer session with Marcus Jackson in the Grupp Fireside Lounge of the Richard E. Winter Student Center, 80 Hughes Avenue Buffalo, NY 14208. The event is free and open to the public.

ABOUT THE POET

Marcus Jackson was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. After earning his BA at the University of Toledo, he continued his poetry studies in NYU’s graduate creative writing program and as a Cave Canem fellow.​

His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. His chapbook, Rundown, was published by Aureole Press in 2009. His debut full-length collection of poems, entitled Neighborhood Register, was released in 2011, and his second book-length collection, Pardon My Heart, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2018.

Marcus lives with his wife and child in Columbus, Ohio and teaches in the MFA programs at Ohio State and Queens University of Charlotte. He read in Just Buffalo Center’s Silo City Reading Series in 2018.

Thursday, April 23, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Ansie Baird will be the featured reader at the next Kenmore Village Improvement Society Open Mic Night curated and hosted by BlazeVOX Books publisher Geoffrey Gatza at the KVIS/Made for Good Shop, 7 Warren Avenue (near Delaware Ave.) in Kenmore, NY. Additional reading slots are available. The event is free and open to the public.

Ansie Baird is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, In Advance Of All Parting, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2009, The Solace of Islands (BlazeVOX Books, 2016), and Porch Watch (Foundlings Press, 2019). She taught and served as poet-in-residence at Buffalo Seminary for 40 years, and is also a former co-editor of both Audit and Earth’s Daughters magazines. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, and numerous other journals.

Thursday, April 23, 7:30 p.m.: Just Buffalo Literary Center BABEL Series talk by and discussion with Imani Perry.

MacArthur genius and National Book Award winner Imani Perry talks about her new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Blending history, art, and personal reflection, Perry illuminates the forces that have shaped American life and the Black imagination through the color blue—from indigo cloth to blues music.

Born just nine years after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Imani Perry was instilled from an early age with a strong instinct for justice and progressive change. The rich interplay between history, race, law, and culture continues to inform her work as a critically-acclaimed author and professor of studies of women, gender and sexuality and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.

Perry’s work reflects the deeply complex history of Black thought, art, and imagination. Her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, is a surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture from indigo to Louis Armstrong and beyond.

Her National Book Award-winning book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is a narrative journey through the American South, in which Perry asserts that if we do indeed want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Her book Breathe: A Letter to My Sons explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world.

In each of her previous works, Perry endeavors to apply the lessons of modern history to our present struggle, whether to challenge or to celebrate. Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry is a revealing biography of one of the most gifted and charismatic—yet least understood—Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century; May We Forever Stand traces the history of the Black National Anthem; More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States is an examination of contemporary practices of racial inequality that persist despite formal declarations of racial equality; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation is a work of critical theory that traces the thread of modern patriarchy from the transatlantic slave trade and the age of conquest through the present day; Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop engages with the artistry, politics, and culture of hip hop.

Perry’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies.

In her talk and conversation with Just Buffalo Artistic Director Barbara Cole, Perry will discuss how in America the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue.

Kleinhans Music Hall, 3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo. $48.

Visit http://www.justbuffalo.org for tickets to the event, which also include an online livestreaming option.

Friday, April 24, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.: 4th Friday Poetry Series featuring Buffalo-based poet Lynne Ciesielski, author of the recent poetry collection My Spanglish Es Impeccable. Additional reading slots available. Dog Ears Bookstore & Café, 688 Abbott Rd., Buffalo. $5.

Saturday, April 25, 5 p.m.: Pure Ink Poetry presents Lyric +Verse, the poetry of Pure Ink’s season at the Ruben Santiago-Hudson Fine Arts Center of Global Concepts Charter High School, 168 Roland Street in Lackawanna, NY. Admission is $10. For additional information, visit pureinkpoetry.com.