February 9, 7:45 p.m.
with the Royal Hartigan Jazz Quartet

Ed Roberson's several books of poetry include When Thy King is a Boy, Etai-Eken, Lucid Interval as Integral Music, Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (winner 1995 Iowa Poetry Prize), Just In: Word of Navigational Change: New and Selected Work, and the forthcoming Atmospheric Conditions (winner of the 1998 National Poetry Series Competition). Compared variously to the work of Ornette Coleman and Gabriel García Márquez, Ed Roberson's oblique and visionary poetry is grounded in specific African-American experience even as it divagates through other histories, through painting, and through music. "Roberson is one of those 'hidden masters'-poets who have worked quietly in private without fanfare, only to emerge as vastly more accomplished than those of whom we have heard much."-Ed Foster.
Royal Hartigan is a percussionist and jazz musician who has studied traditional musics of (and in) many cultures, including those of Tibet, Malaysia, China, the Philippines, and West Africa. He is joined by Richard Harper, piano; Wes Brown, bass; and David Bindman, saxophone.
Note: On the day of the reading, at 2:30 pm, Ed Roberson and the Royal Hartigan Quartet will be available to meet students and community members at the Walsh Library Gallery, where the special exhibition of Carl Van Vechten photographs "O, Write My Name" American Portraits-Harlem Heroes" will be on view, organized by the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library.