KU News Release

Amiri Baraka (Photo by Chris Funkhouser)

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More Information

• Department of African and African-American Studies
• Langston Hughes Center
• Kansas African Studies Center

LAWRENCE — Amiri Baraka, a poet, playwright, novelist, music critic and political activist, will give a public lecture and poetry reading next month at the University of Kansas.

Baraka will speak on “Racism, Imperialism and the Obama Presidency” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3, at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The lecture and reading are free. It will be his second appearance at KU since 2002.

The lecture is part of the Marwa Africana Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of African and African-American Studies. Other sponsors of the event are the Langston Hughes Center, the Kansas African Studies Center and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Widely recognized as the father of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s, Baraka is author of more than 40 books of essays, poems, drama, fiction, memoirs, music history and criticism. A political activist, Baraka’s commitment to social justice as an American writer is widely respected. He has lectured throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.

Baraka’s first volume of poetry, “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,” was published in 1961, and his most recent book, “Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music,” was published this year.

In 1963, Baraka’s signature study of African-American music was published in “Blues People: Negro Music in White America.” That same year, he established himself as a playwright with the publication of “Dutchman,” a controversial drama that won an Obie Award and later was made into a film. Baraka’s Web page says the play “practically seeded ‘the cultural corollary to black nationalism’ of that revolutionary American milieu.”

His long list of books range from “Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones,” published in 1979, to “The Music” written by Baraka and his wife, Amina, also a poet, and published in 1987, to a recent collection of essays “The Essence of Reparations” published in 2003. The essays explore what Baraka suggests will “become a 21st century watershed movement of black peoples” involving the issues he has been addressing for many years — racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation.

Baraka is poet laureate of New Jersey and has taught at Yale University, Columbia University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been the subject of documentary films including Mario Van Peeble’s “Poetic License” and St. Clair Bourne’s “In Motion: Amiri Baraka.”

His many literary prizes and honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, the Langston Hughes Award from the City College of New York and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts

The Marwa Africana Lecture Series was established in 2003 through a donation to KU Endowment by Mohamed Buba Marwa, a Nigerian businessman, politician and philanthropist, who is the Nigerian amabassador to South Africa. The series annually sponsors lectures by leaders addressing matters related to Africa or the African diaspora or both. Previous lecturers include Martin Bernal in 2008, Molefi K. Asanta in 2005 and Ali Mazrui in 2004.

The funds are managed by KU Endowment, the official fundraising and fund-management foundation for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment was the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.