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).