Poet Laureate Inaugural Reading

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The American history that most of us are familiar with is one that paints a picture of segregated ethnic groups, depicting Whites as slave owners, Africans as slaves, and Native Americans as tribe members. In most of our minds, all three groups were separate and played a very specific and hierarchical role in history. Yet, before North America was widely colonized, distinct segregation did not exist, and the interaction between Africans and Native Americans was somewhat frequent. Enslaved Africans escaped to Native American tribes (some tribes even hosted stops on the Underground Railroad), some Native Americans were enslaved by Europeans alongside Africans, and some Native Americans had African slaves. Often times, the two groups worked alongside each other, lived together, and shared recipes, myths, legends, and herbal remedies. Africans and Native Americans intermarried and had children. In fact, relations were so frequent that when a census was taken in the early 1800s, 10% of the Cherokee Nation was of African descent; 100 years later, this number increased to 50%.

Leslie Ann Berg, “Down Blige Road: Where There’s No Place Like Home,” Richmond Hill Reflections, (Volume 10, Number 4, September, 2014). 60. http://www.richmondhillreflectionsmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/RelectionsVol10No4.pdf.

Poet Laureate Inaugural Reading

Poet Laureate Inaugural Reading

Library of Congress
Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building (ground floor) (view map)
10 First Street, SE
Washington, D.C.
2012-09-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Natasha Trethewey, the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the Library of Congress, will kick off the Library’s literary season with a reading. The event is free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow.

For more information, click here. Also, a list of 2012/2013 public readings by Poet Laureate Trethewey are here.

View the inaugural reading here.

Tags: Library of Congress, Natasha Trethewey

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2012 at 23:34Z and is filed under Live Events, Media Archive, Poetry, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Poet Laureate Inaugural Reading

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