Wed 5/20 @ 6PM

While legendary Harlem Renaissance poet/playwright/novelist Langston Hughes didn’t spend a lot of his life in Cleveland — he passed through for a couple of years, living in Fairfax and attending Central High School as a teenager, and taking part in artist programs at Karamu — Cleveland has always claimed a piece of the influential writer/social justice activist as its own.

Learn more about his peripatetic life and his diverse influences in a program called My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy, based on the book of the same name by which Indiana University Professor of African American and African Diasporic Studies Dr. Randal M. Jelks. Jelks will talk about how Hughes was impacted by the many places he lives in the U.S., Europe and Mexico and how they shaped his thinking and his work as a young man with a focus on Hughes’ perspectives on democracy, human struggling and creativity.

“With care and no-holds-barred insight, My America removes the veneer of respectability often placed on Hughes’s work and life to reveal his political adeptness,” we’re told. “In a world threatened by fascism, Hughes’s writing wasn’t afforded the luxury of subtlety. He made a spiritual and political decision to stand on the side of the oppressed. He believed art should be practiced for the sake of justice. And democracy can be practiced with joy.”

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards program director Kortney Morrow will moderate the talk. Copies of Dr. Jelks’ book will be available for purchase. The talk is free and open to the public. Get more information here.