The Woody Guthrie Center invites you on Friday, Sept. 6 at 6 p.m. to People’s Poetry during First Friday Art Crawl. This night of local poetry will feature readings from Quraysh Ali Lansana, Nuova Wright, Zhenya Yevtushenko and Josh Shepard.
About People’s Poetry:
Woody Guthrie was an artist in multiple mediums. In addition to his music and paintings, Woody was a prolific writer, producing a bulk of poems, essays, short stories, and more.
Often called the “Poet of the People,” Woody’s writing was an important tool both for his personal self-expression and his life-long commitment to activism.
Woody Guthrie once wrote, “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is or who’s out of work and how to fix it or who’s broke and where the money is or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.”
This bent toward repairing the damages of the world was at the forefront of his creative drive. People’s Poetry carries on the legacy of Woody Guthrie and his writing while also highlighting the voice of today’s poets who use their craft towards that same end: highlighting the injustices of the world and pushing us all towards a better world.
Details:
Friday, Sept. 6
6 p.m.
Woody Guthrie Center
102 E. Reconciliation Way, Tulsa, OK 74103
Tickets:
Free with Woody Guthrie Center admission $5 during First Friday
Nuova WRight
Nuova Wright is the author of “little wife: the story of gold” (The Calliope Group). Their poems have appeared in Santa Clara Review, Spill Words, Elephants Never, Please See Me, Q/A
Poetry, The Girl God, Word Riot, This Land, and on countless restaurant napkins. Wright is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a 2004 Grolier Prize finalist. They are also the author of three poetry chapbooks: Black Pussy (2004), prayers of Calcitrant (2010), and imaginary lovers (2013).
Zhenya Yevtushenko
Zhenya Yevtushenko, son of the late poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, aspires to become a teacher. He is cofounder of Sunday Collective, an organizer with Swan Song Studios and the Living Arts Poetry Committee. He’s a student, a food service roustabout, and might be the only poet to have performed at The Library of Congress and Mercury Lounge. His work has been published in The Guardian, Right Hand Pointing, failbetter, The Tulsa Review and eMerge Magazine. Together with Torres Fine Art, their three-part collaborative project “Empire of Missed Chances” is set to launch on September 19.
Josh Shepard
Josh Shepard is the author of CUTTING PROMOS: Pro Wrestling Erasure Poems (BRUISER Magazine, 2024) and Inside Voice: Poems Overheard (Ghost City Press, 2022). He lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he works for the public library.
Quraysh Ali Lansana
Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of over twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. Lansana is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow and a Visiting Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa. He was formerly a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR’s Focus: Black Oklahoma monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and was a Peabody Award nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film “Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later.” His most recent books include Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse (with Joel Daniel Phillips), Opal’s Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams: new and collected poems, 1995-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include a children’s biography of Ralph Ellison, a memoir on the last decade of his mentor, Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, and a series of books on the Black Rodeo. He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective.
