Peniel Joseph & Sonia Sanchez

Moderated by Rosa Clemente 2008 Vice-Presidential Candidate

Thursday, January 14
7:30 pm
Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15

Poetry by kahlil almustafa reading from From Auction Block to Oval Office: 100 poems in the first 100 days of Obama's presidency
Brecht Forum
451 West Street
between Bank & Bethune Streets, New York, NY 10014
Phone: (212) 242-4201
Email: brechtforum@brechtforum.org
http://brechtforum.org/events/dark-days-bright-nightsblack-power-obama

The Brecht Forum is proud to welcome renowned poet Sonia Sanchez and activist scholar Peniel Joseph as we celebrate the publication of their respective books Morning Haiku and Dark Days, Brights Nights. Join us for an inter-generational dialogue looking back at the development of the civil rights and Black Power movement and where the Black movement goes from here.

About Dark Days, Bright Nights
The Civil Rights Movement is now remembered as a long-lost era, which came to an end along with the idealism of the 1960s. In Dark Days, Bright Nights, Joseph puts this pat assessment to the test, showing the 60s—particularly the tumultuous period after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act—to be the catalyst of a movement that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Joseph argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic impulses. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black Power Movement, conventionally adjudged a failure. Joseph resurrects the movement to elucidate its unfairly forgotten achievements.

Told through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Amiri Baraka, Tupac Shakur, and Barack Obama, Dark Days, Bright Nights will make coherent a fraught half-century of struggle, reassessing its impact on American democracy and the larger world.

About Morning Haiku
This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez is a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach "exploding in the universe," the "blue hallelujahs" of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta "thundering out of the earth." Sanchez sings the praises of contemporaries whose poetic alchemy turns "words into gems": Maya Angelou, Richard Long, and Toni Morrison. And she pays homage to peace workers and civil rights activists from Rosa Parks and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to Brother Damu, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. Often arranged in strings of twelve or more, the haiku flow one into the other in a steady song of commemoration.

Peniel E. Joseph teaches in the History Department at Tufts University. Although Joseph’s formal expertise includes the Black Radical Tradition, Pan-Africanism, Black Social Movements, and African American feminism, he is currently embarking on a re-evaluation of the Black Power Movement. Joseph is the founder of a growing subfield of historical and Africana Studies scholarship that he has named “Black Power Studies.” This new scholarship, which connects grassroots activism to national struggles for black self-determination and international African independence movements, is actively rewriting postwar African American history.

Sonia Sanchez—award-winning poet, activist, scholar—was the Laura Carnell professor of English and women’s studies at Temple University. She is the recipient of both the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, among dozens of other honors. Widely considered one of the most important writers of the Black Arts movement, Sanchez is the author of sixteen books, including Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Does Your House Have Lions? Wounded in the House of a Friend, and Shake Loose My Skin. She lives in Philadelphia and New York City.