A.B. Spellman, Kyle Dargan, and Gregory Pardlo April 10

We're looking forward to the April 10 reading by Kyle Dargan, Gregory Pardlo, and A.B. Spellman, poets who will be published in the forthcoming Angles of Ascent: A W.W. Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. The reading takes place 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 10 at The Writer’s Center, and will be followed by a reception and book signing. General admission is $5.00 (free to members and full-time students.) This is the inaugural reading of the Politics & Prose at The Writer’s Center poetry series. We will announce additional readings as they are scheduled. For more information call The Writer’s Center at 301-654-8664 or Politics & Prose at 202-364-1919.


Kyle Dargan is author of three collections of poems, Logorrhea Dementia: A Self-Diagnosis (University of Georgia Press, 2010), Bouquet of Hungers (University of Georgia Press, 2007) and The Listening (University of Georgia Press, 2004), winner of the Cave Canem Prize. His poems have also appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Callaloo, and other journals. He is an assistant professor of literature at American University and editor of Post No Ills Magazine (online), which he founded in 2008. In 2008, he won the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and he was selected as the 2007 Drew Darrow Memorial Reader at Bucknell University.

Gregory Pardlo is an associate editor of Callaloo, graduated from Rutgers University (1999) and received the MFA in poetry from New York University in 2001. He is author of Totem (APR, Copper Canyon, 2007), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize; and translator of Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace: Selected Poems of Niels Lyngsoe (Toronto: BookThug, 2005). Pardllo is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

A. B. Spellman is author of The Beautiful Days (Poets Press, 1965), Things I Must Have Known (Coffee House Press, 2008), Four Lives in the Bee-Bop Business (Pantheon Books, 1966), other editions under the title of Four Jazz Lives (University of Michigan Press) and Art Tatum: A Critical Biography (a chapbook). He has taught at Rutgers University, Morehouse College, Harvard University, and other institutions. He also worked for several years for the National Endowment for the Arts, where he served in various positions such as director of the Arts in Education Study Project, director of the Arts Endowment Expansion Program, and deputy chairman for the Office of Guidelines, Panel, and Council Operations.