SU Hosts Poetry Reading by Frank X. Walker and Shauna Morgan February 9

SALISBURY, MD---NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry winner Frank X. Walker and emerging poet Shauna Morgan continue Salisbury University’s African American History Month celebration with a reading from their works 7 p.m. Tuesday, February 9, in the Wicomico Room of the Guerrieri University Center.

Walker, former Kentucky poet laureate, is the originator of the word “Affrilachia,” which revises popular perceptions of Appalachia as home to only whites, and founding editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture. He also is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which won the NAACP Image Award, and Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award. His latest collections are The Affrilachian Sonnets and About Flight.

Morgan, a native of the rural district of Clarendon, Jamaica, and frequent collaborator with Walker, is the author of two chapbooks, Passages and This Black Love. Her work has appeared in publications including ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Cousciousness; Pluck!; The Iperian; and Anthology of Appalachian Writers Volume VI. Her poems were shortlisted for the 2011 Small Axe literary prize. She teaches literature of the African Diaspora at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Through their poetry, Walker and Morgan expand ideas about the geographies of African American memory.

Sponsored by the Multicultural Student Services and Student Affairs offices, Charles R. and Martha N. Fulton School of Liberal Arts Public Humanities Initiative, Writers on the Shore and English Department, admission is free and the public is invited.

For more information call 410-548-4503 or visit the SU website at www.salisbury.edu.