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Books
by Afaa Michael Weaver
Water Song
(1985) / Multitudes (2000) /
Sandy Point (2000) /
The Ten Lights of God (2000)
These Hands I Know /
The Plum Flower Dance
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Afaa Michael Weaver
at Pratt Library
Saturday, April
19, 2008, 2:00p.m.
Afaa Michael Weaver
was born on Baltimore’s eastside and graduated high
school during the turbulent Spring of 1968. Marking the
fortieth anniversary of that personal milestone, as well
as a chaotic chapter in the city’s history, Weaver
returns to Baltimore to read at CityLit Festival from
The Plum Flower Dance at 2:00.
Weaver wrote and
published poetry on the side while working factory jobs
at Procter & Gamble and Bethlehem Steel. He founded 7th
Son Press and published the journal Blind Alleys,
which featured Andrei Codrescu, Frank Marshall Davis,
and Lucille Clifton among others. As a freelancer, he
has written for the Baltimore Sun, the Boston
Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago
Tribune, and the Baltimore Afro-American.
He began his
teaching career as an adjunct in 1987, teaching at New
York University, the City University of New York, Seton
Hall Law School, and Essex County College. In 1990, he
began at Rutgers Camden and received tenure with
distinction there as an early candidate. In 1998, Weaver
joined the English Department at Simmons College, where
he founded the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center.
Deputy Mayor Salima
Siler Marriott, Pratt Library Executive Director Dr.
Carla Hayden, and CityLit Project Executive Director
Gregg Wilhelm join the poet at 10:30 to declare April 19
“Afaa Michael Weaver Day.”
Programs take place throughout the library. A complete
schedule of times and locations is available at
City Lit Project.
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Important links:
afaamweaver /
My Father's Geography /
Concord Poetry
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A poet forged in
heartbreak—He has just published
The Plum Flower Dance, a collection of his work
from 1985 to 2005. He is featured on the cover of this
month's Poets & Writers magazine. Boston
University recently asked him to donate his papers to
the university's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research
Center. (Weaver said yes.) Heady stuff - absolutely none
of which Weaver, now 56, takes for granted. He spent too
many years working in the warehouses and steel mills of
Baltimore, scribbling lines of poetry during coffee
breaks. "In the warehouse, it was thousands of boxes
circling around—every day the same thing," he recalls.
"You felt like you were being pounded into anonymity.
Holding on to the poetry was a way of keeping myself
alive. "It still is, though Weaver does not look like
the stereotypical poet on this recent weekday in his
Simmons College office. He wears a trim blue blazer, a
blue shirt, and a mild tie. No campus casual for Weaver:
He dresses this way every day, as if heeding Flaubert's
advice to "Be regular and orderly in your life like a
bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in
your work." . . .
Weaver's precocity
was such that he skipped eighth grade and enrolled early
at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, known for its
rigorous curriculum and such alumni as H.L. Mencken and
Dashiell Hammett. When he asked his mother for
permission to try out for the football team at Poly, her
refusal was couched in terms that spelled out the high
hopes she had for him: "You might hurt your head, and
that's the most valuable thing you have."
He knew that. Young
Michael Weaver's mind was so hungry for knowledge that,
whatever the subject, his interest in it "exceeded the
hours in the day," says Weaver, adding: "I still feel
that way now." When he was asked to do a research
project, he chose for his subject the complex
architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. But the
careful architecture of Weaver's own life was soon to
develop cracks and fissures.
He enrolled at the
University of Maryland in 1968. College Park was as far
from Baltimore as he was willing to venture, and even
that turned out to be too far. "I had never been totally
in a white environment," he says. "My insecurities just
overwhelmed me, and after two years I came home." In
1970, his girlfriend got pregnant, so they married. He
was 19. Eager to prove himself in some way in the wider
world, he joined the Army Reserves. . . .Boston.com
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posted 16 April 2008
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