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Poet Yusef Komunyakaa to be Honored at MCC Poetry Festival
Third annual La Guagua Poetry Fest to be held Friday & Saturday, March 29 & 30, in Lowell – Komunyakaa to read & talk Saturday afternoon
Middlesex Community College’s third annual La Guagua Poetry Festival, to be held Friday and Saturday, March 29 and 30, will honor the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who will give a reading and talk at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday.
MCC’s two-day, community poetry festival will include readings, panel discussions and an art exhibit, and feature the work of 26 local, regional and international poets, translators and artists. It will be held in the Donahue Family Academic Arts Center, 240 Central St., on the Lowell campus. Admission is free and open to the public.
The festival begins Friday and runs from 6:45 to 8:30 p.m. with readings and panels by guest poets.
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On Saturday, the festival continues from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with panels and poetry readings before and after lunch, and Komunyakaa’s reading and talk at 1:30 p.m..
Born in Louisiana, Komunyakaa grew up in the rural South at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Celebrated for his autobiographical poems about race, the Vietnam War, jazz and blues, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Komunyakaa was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999 and is currently Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University's graduate creative writing program.
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The third La Guagua Poetry Festival multilingual anthology, titled “Celebration and Confrontation,” will be given out free to festival attendees and is dedicated to Komunyakaa.
Founded in 2016, MCC’s La Guagua Poetry Festival grew out of the La Guagua (a school bus) Reading Group, a gathering of students interested in Spanish literature organized in 2015 by Assistant Professor of English Willy Ramirez.
For further information about MCC’s La Guagua Poetry Festival, contact Willy Ramirez at ramirezw@middlesex.mass.edu or 978-656-3108.
Discover your path at Middlesex Community College. As one of the largest, most comprehensive community colleges in Massachusetts, we educate, engage and empower a diverse community of learners. MCC offers more than 80 degree and certificate programs – plus hundreds of noncredit courses – on our campuses in Bedford and Lowell, and online. Middlesex Community College: Student success starts here!
