Etheridge Knight Poetry Reading

  • Free Events
  • Literature
  • Poetry & Spoken Word
  • Chatterbox Jazz Club

Etheridge Knight Poetry Reading

  • Free Events
  • Literature
  • Poetry & Spoken Word
  • Chatterbox Jazz Club

Sep 6

6pm – 7pm

Join Indianapolis poets Debra Kang Dean, Allyson Horton, and Norman Minnick for a FREE public reading of Black Arts Movement poet Etheridge Knight’s work. Enjoy Legacy Written in Truth, the portrait mural of Etheridge Knight, created in 2023 by EVOCA1 (Elio Mercado), as you listen to Knight’s words.

Etheridge Knight (b. Corinth, Mississippi, April 19, 1931 – d. Indianapolis, March 10, 1991) was an award-winning poet and a leading light of the Black Arts Movement. Wounded during service in the Korean War, he returned to civilian life in Indianapolis with an opiate addiction. After a robbery conviction, he spent 9 years in the Indiana State Penitentiary where he developed himself as a poet. His first collection, Poems from Prison, was published in 1968 and included the following text on its back cover: “I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.” He was released in 1969 and went on to attain international recognition as a major poet, earning both Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations for Belly Song and Other Poems (1973) among other accolades. He taught poetry and creative writing around the U.S. for the rest of his career, moving back home to Indianapolis near the end of his life where he lived in Barton Towers, finally received an honorary degree, and ran his Free Peoples’ Poetry Workshops out of the Chatterbox Jazz Club and other locations along Massachusetts Avenue. Knight’s literary legacy is one of “real talk,” and the power of the truth of Blackness.

This event has been organized by the Butler University Center for Citizenship and Community and the EKFreePeoplesBe project, and is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

Additional funding has been provided by the Mass Ave Community Development Corporation and the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors (MIBOR).

Add to Calendar +
Speakers

Debra Kang Dean is an Indianapolis resident and is on the poetry faculty at Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. Totem: America, Dean’s third full-length collection of poetry, was shortlisted for the Indiana Authors Award in Poetry in 2020, and her Fugitive Blues, a prize-winning chapbook of poems, was published by Moon Press in 2013. Her review of The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems appeared in Good River Review in 2023.

Debra Kang Dean

Allyson Horton is a poet, writer, educator, and author of Quick Fire: Poems, her first collection of poetry (Third World Press Foundation). Horton is an “It’s Showtime at the Apollo!” winner whose spoken word performance received a standing ovation for an original piece entitled “The Stars That Spangle in the Banner” (1998). She went on to earn a Creative Writing MFA from Butler University. Her poems have appeared in Turn the Page, You Don’t Stop: Sharing Successful Chapters in Our Lives with Youth, It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop, The Indianapolis Anthology, and other publications. Her work has been published in The Indianapolis Review as well as African Voices. Currently, Horton serves as a senior editor for Third World Press Foundation. She resides in her hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, and her second book of poetry is forthcoming in the winter of 2025.

Allyson Horton

Norman Minnick is the author of three poetry collections and editor of several anthologies. Most recently, he is the editor of The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight and We Rode the Rhythms as One: On the Poetry of Etheridge Knight, University of Michigan Press Under Discussion Series, Ann Arbor (Forthcoming 2024).

Norman Minnick