Celebrate The Life Of Langston Hughes At Princeton University

PRINCETON, NJ — African American poet Langston Hughes will be honored during an upcoming conference at Princeton University, 50 years after his death. "Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later" will highlight the contributions of Hughes, best-known as a vanguard of the literary and creative movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

It takes place Nov. 10-11. Over two days, scholars, writers and poets from across the country will look back at the life, work and continuing impact of Hughes.

"Since his death in May 1967, his art, particularly his poetry, has been invoked to articulate both some of the nation’s loftiest hopes and its deepest fears,” conference organizer Wallace Best writes.
Best wrote “Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem” (NYU Press, 2017). He is also a professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton.

On the first afternoon, he will speak with Arnold Rampersad, author of a two-volume biography of Hughes, “The Life of Langston Hughes” (Oxford University Press, 2 vols, 1986, 1988). Rampersad is professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

That session will be moderated by Imani Perry in McCosh Hall, Room 50, 4 p.m. Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American studies at Princeton.

Elizabeth Alexander, a poet and scholar, will deliver the keynote address for the conference on Friday evening at 7:30 p.m. in McCosh Hall, Room 50. Alexander is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. In 2009, she became only the fourth poet to read her poetry at an American presidential inauguration.

Additional panelists include James T. Campbell of Stanford University, who will offer the conference comment; Randal Maurice Jelks, University of Kansas; John Edgar Tidwell, University of Kansas; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University; Evie Shockley, Rutgers University; Herman Beavers, University of Pennslyvania; David Roessel, Stockton University; Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Spelman College; Vera Kutzinski, Vanderbilt University; Anne Anlin Cheng, Princeton University; David Chinitz, Loyola University Chicago; Steven Tracy, University of Massachussetts-Amherst; Christopher De Santis, Illinois State University; Josef Sorett, Columbia University; and scholar and documentarian Carmaletta Williams.

The conference concludes on Saturday night with performances in Wallace Theatre in the Lewis Arts complex. Tatayania Robinson will perform Hughes’ “The Negro and the Racial Mountain”; Steven Tracy will perform musical renditions of Hughes; and poet laureate Tracy K. Smith of Princeton and Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, will perform poetry.

The keynote address and selected panels will be recorded and streamed live. "Remembering Langston Hughes" is free and open to the public, but registration is requested. The full schedule and registration instructions can be found online at conference.aas.princeton.edu.

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