The Department of English has named poet and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis as the Sterling Allen Brown Professor of English and Humanities for the spring 2015 semester. Ellis, the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (Graywolf Press), has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of San Francisco and Wesleyan University and has served as a visiting writer at the University of San Francisco. His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as The Paris Review, The Nation, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Tin House, Transition and Best American Poetry. Ellis is a recipient of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers Award and the Salmon O. Levinson Prize for “Vernacular Owl,” an elegy-homage to Amiri Baraka. Ellis is also a faculty member for Cave Canem, a premiere institution for African American poetry, a co-founding member of the Dark Room Collective and the founder of Heroes Are Gang Members—a band of poets and musicians. During his tenure at Howard, Ellis will continue to draft “The GoGo Book: People in the Pocket in Washington, D.C.” and “Crank Shaped Notes,” a collection of prose and lyrics aphorisms about GoGo, vanishing folk culture and the struggle for statehood in the District of Columbia. Ellis also will lead two writing workshops for students and members of the Howard community (Jan. 21-22); conduct a public lecture (“A Crank-Shaped Lecture: The Hip Hop in Go-Go’s Pocket” in February); and hold a conversation with Howard faculty member Dr. Meta D. Jones (author of The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word). Ellis’s professorship will culminate with a tribute concert and CD debut featuring Heroes Are Gang Leaders in honor of Amiri Baraka during National Poetry Month and in collaboration with the department’s Sterling Brown/Lucille Clifton/Amiri Baraka Poetry Series held in April. The Sterling A. Brown Professor of English and the Humanities is funded by a Challenge Grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a part of an on-going effort to endow a chair in honor of Professor Brown. The Brown/Clifton/Baraka Poetry Series is privately funded by a grant from Reed and Marjie Tuckson. Ellis, a Washington native and Dunbar High School graduate, follows Eleanor W. Traylor (Spring 2012), Daryl Cumber Dance (Spring 2013), and Haile Gerima (Spring 2014) as the fourth Sterling Allen Brown Professor. For more information, contact Dr. Dana A. Williams, chair of the Department of English at [email protected] or 202-806-6730. Or visit coas.howard.edu/english.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 04:30:41 +0000
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