Busboys Books Presents: Langston Hughes by Jason Miller in conversation with Andy Shallal
Date and Time
Feb 10, 2020 6:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Feb 10, 2020 6:00 pm
14th & V
This event is FREE and open to the public. Books will be on sale in the bookstore and full menu & bar will be served inside the event space.
Join Busboys and Poets very own Andy Shallal in conversation with author Jason Miller. They will be discussing Jason’s new book Langston Hughes, and celebrating the great poets’ birthday inside our very own Langston Room.
As the first black author in America to make his living exclusively by writing, Langston Hughes inspired a generation of writers and activists. One of the pioneers of jazz poetry, Hughes led the Harlem Renaissance, while Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked Hughes’s signature metaphor of dreaming in his speeches. In this new biography, W. Jason Miller illuminates Hughes’s status as an international literary figure through a compelling look at the relationship between his extraordinary life and his canonical works. Drawing on unpublished letters and manuscripts, Miller addresses Hughes’s often ignored contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as well as his complex and well-guarded sexuality, and repositions him as a writer rather than merely the most beloved African American poet of the twentieth century.
W. Jason Miller is professor of literature at North Carolina State University. He is the author ofLangston Hughes and American Lynching Culture(2011) and Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric (2015).
