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Contact: Maryemma Graham, (785) 864-2557; Bill Tuttle, (785) 864-9476; Barbara Watkins, (785) 864-7881; or Alison Watkins, Langston Hughes Poetry Project, (785) 864-7863.

NEH grant helps bring Langston Hughes' poetry to Web generation

LAWRENCE -- The University of Kansas has received a $40,500 planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that will extend activities related to the centennial birthday celebration of the writer Langston Hughes throughout next year.

The NEH grant provides funding to develop a Web site, www.kuce.org/hughes/, that serves both a national poetry project and next year's Langston Hughes symposium.

Maryemma Graham, KU English professor, and Bill Tuttle, KU American studies professor, co-direct the planning grant, "Speaking of Rivers: Taking Poetry to the People."

"We hope to launch a national poetry project to promote reading, listening and appreciating poetry in the United States and abroad," Graham said. The NEH planning grant also supports online resources, exhibits and resource kits on Langston Hughes and American poetry.

The Langston Hughes symposium Jan. 31 and Feb. 7 to 10, 2002, is a first step for this long-range plan. Although the NEH grant does not fund the symposium, it does provide for videotaping sessions and recording readings from the symposium to be accessible on the Web site.

Tuttle said, "The planning grant has enabled us to set up a Web site not only to promote the symposium and give public access to information about Hughes and his work but also to provide an online forum for people to discuss what they've read."

Graham said, "The National Endowment for the Humanities believes, as we do and as Hughes did, that poetry is one of the most powerful ways of connecting a dividing world, of healing the spirit and of inspiring vision. We begin with Langston Hughes, whose boyhood home was in Lawrence."

This month the poetry project begins with a test phase at the Lawrence Public Library, the site of the first "Reading and Remembering Langston Hughes" poetry circles, funded by the Kansas Humanities Council.

In 2002, the KHC "Reading and Remembering Langston Hughes" program expands to five more Kansas cities -- Topeka, Iola, Independence, Hays and Norton. A national model will be created from the work from the Kansas poetry circles. John Edgar Tidwell, KU associate professor of English, directs the KHC project.

Graham and Tuttle, co-directors of the planning grant, work with a regional planning committee that includes Nancy Hiebert, community liaison; Sandra Wiechert, Lawrence Public Library programs coordinator; Rowena Stewart, executive director of the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Mo.; Bryan Vescio, Missouri Southern State College, Joplin; and Barbara Watkins and Heather Hoy, both with KU Continuing Education.

The regional group works with an advisory board that includes:

 • Jabari Asim, senior editor, Washington Post Book World;

 • Sheila Biddle, Columbia University history professor and former head of the Education and Culture Division of the Ford Foundation;

 • Akiba Sullivan Harper, Spelman College (Atlanta) English professor and a founding member and past president of the Langston Hughes Society;

 • Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University English professor and Hughes biographer;

 • Kevin Powell, poet, editor and cultural critic and founding editor of Vibe magazine;

 • Jerry W. Ward Jr., Tougaloo College (Mississippi) English professor and poet.

Asim, Sullivan Harper, Rampersad and Powell plan to be in Lawrence Feb. 7 to 10, 2002, to participate in the Langston Hughes "Let America Be America Again" symposium. Pre-conference events include a Jan. 31 lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and visits to Lawrence public schools by poets participating in the symposium.