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| MK Asante |
Don’t miss our Acting Director of Creative Writing, Professor Lisa Page, in conversation with MK Asante this month (September 17 at 7 PM) at the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital, 921 Pennsylvania Avenue SE. This conversation is part of PEN/Faulkner’s Fall 2013 Literary Reading Series. Professor Page is former President of PEN/Faulkner and is on the Board of Directors. Her conversation with Asante will focus on Asante’s recent memoir BUCK (the evening will also include a reading from BUCK). According to the PEN/Faulkner site:
“MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation’s dance company and a father who would soon become the revered pioneer in Black Studies. A little more than a decade later MK found himself alone in North Philadelphia — his mother in a mental hospital, his father gone, his older brother locked up in a prison — forced to find his own way to survive physically, mentally, and spiritually, by any means necessary.
A teenager lost in a fog of drugs, sex, and violence on the streets of Killadelphia, Asante sought refuge in the poetry of hip-hop giants — from Tupac, to Jay-Z, to Nas — and later, in the words of Kerouac, Whitman, Orwell, and even the diary of his own mother. BUCK is the unforgettable story of Asante’s rise from dealer and delinquent to writer, filmmaker, poet, and professor. It is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself with the most unconventional of teachers — outlaws and eccentrics, rappers and mystic strangers, ghetto philosophers and strippers, and, eventually, an alternative school that transformed his life with a single blank sheet of paper.”
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| Professor Lisa Page |
Join Professor Page in the conversation on September 17! You can read more
and register for this free event here.
