Posting on behalf of the University of Detroit Mercy. Please see below for RSVP and contact information. We'd love to have you join us! -- Jennifer Dean The University of Detroit Mercy Press, McNichols Campus Library, Department of English, African American Studies Program, and Broadside Lotus Press cordially invite you to celebrate the publication of the new poetry collection Medicine: New and Selected Poems by Aneb Kgositsile Wednesday, April 11, 2018 Reception at 6:30 PM Reading at 7:00 PM McNichols Campus Library | Second Floor, Bargman Room University of Detroit Mercy 4001 W. McNichols Rd, Detroit, MI 48221 This event is free and open to the public. An RSVP is appreciated. For more information or to RSVP, please contact Rosemary Weatherston, Director UDM Press, at 313.993.1083 or weatherr@udmercy.edu. Aneb Kgositsile (Gloria House, Ph.D.) is Professor Emerita in Humanities and African American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Associate Professor Emerita in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department of Wayne State University. Aneb is the former Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Michigan Dearborn. She has been an activist in human rights struggles in the U.S. and abroad since the 1960’s, when she was an organizer in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She is the co-founder of the Justice for Cuba Coalition and the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality. Over several decades, she contributed to the development of three African-centered schools in Detroit: Aisha/Dubois, Nsoroma Institute and Timbuktu Academy. From 1992 to 1996, she was a Visiting Professor in the English Department, and Director of the Partnership with Township High Schools at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently engaged in the freedom school movement in Detroit. Aneb has published three previous poetry collections, Blood River (Broadside Press, 1983), Rainrituals (Broadside Press, 1989), Shrines (Third World Press, 2004), and a book of commentary on the political uses of environment in the United States, Tower and Dungeon: A Study of Place and Power in American Culture; and served as lead editor of the anthology, A Different Image: The Legacy of Broadside Press. Her most recent publications include an essay, “The Detroit ’67 Rebellion: The Long Aftermath,” 2017 Catalogue of the Detroit Public Library; a chapter in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC; and a book, Home Sweet Sanctuary: Idlewild Families Celebrate a Century, a cultural study of the African American resort community in Northern Michigan.
From the foreword to Medicine: New and Selected Poems, written by Dr. Michael Simanga:
Aneb Kgositsile is one of our best poets. She is a healer who has organized a cupboard full of secrets gathered from gardens, recipes sewn into quilts, and methodology passed on in whispers. She has written them down in her new collection of poems, Medicine. This book, her fourth collection of poetry, could only come from a poet who is so planted in the black soil and the red clay that the images she spills out over the page cause us to stop, not pause, but stop, close our eyes and let the memory drift up and into our senses where we can taste and smell and feel. Surrender to her spell is strange and wonderful because the individual memory is summoned, but seems incidental. The appeal is for wide, deep connection to spirit, collective consciousness, and remembrances from so far back the names of the original tellers are difficult to recall. Medicine is a book to be carried in a pocket close to the heart. It is collective stories smuggled from person to person, family to family, community to community, south to north, north to west, across rivers and oceans. Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Director, Women's & Gender Studies Program Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture University of Detroit Mercy 4001 W McNichols Road Detroit, MI 48221-3038 p: 313.993.1083 f: 313.993.1166