CAMPFIRE presents Jericho Brown
Thursday, October 24, 2024, 3:03 PM
CAMPFIRE presents | Jericho Brown | Sun. Nov. 3, 6-7:30p, Saloon at the Virginian Courtyard
This November, CAMPFIRE welcomes Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, and MacArthur “Genius” Grant Winner Jericho Brown for an evening of poetry and conversation around how the making of poems interacts with the making of a better life — individually and collectively, spiritually and politically.
In a 2012 essay, Brown writes, “Hope is the opposite of desperation—it’s not as comfortable as certainty, and it’s much more certain than longing. It is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.” In a cultural and political moment when desperation seems to encroach at every angle, we invite you to join us as we contemplate ways of harnessing hope — so that we may cultivate more creative lives for ourselves and those around us.
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. In 2024, Brown was awarded a Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
CAMPFIRE reimagines how we gather as community. Each month, we bring in guest speakers for a unique, participatory storytelling experience, hosted in a subtly ritualized framework, to explore what most drives, moves and inspires us.