UA’s Bankhead Visiting Writers Series To Feature Poet Salaam

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Kalamu ya Salaam, poet and critic, will read portions of his creative work on Thursday, Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m., in the Morgan Hall auditorium on the University of Alabama campus as part of UA’s Bankhead Visiting Writers Series.

The event is free and open to the public.

Salaam’s works include seven books of poetry, two children’s books, and a number of plays. He is the author of “What Is Life? – The Reclamation of the Black Blues Self” and the editor of “WORD UP: Black Poetry of the 80’s from the Deep South.”

His work has been widely published in literary, music, and political journals, including Negro Digest/Black World, First World, and The Black Scholar. In 1998, Salaam received a Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Award.

Other honors include a Mayor Marc Morial’s Arts Award, the 1995 Louisiana Literature Fellowship, a George Washington Freedom’s Foundation Award, two ASCAP Deems-Taylor Awards for excellence in writing about music, and the Deep South Writer’s Contest Award for prose. His jazz play, Body&Soul, won Louisiana State University’s Native Voices competition in 1996. Salaam is the recipient of a 1999 Senior Literature Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.

The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series is made possible by an endowment from the Bankhead Foundation, UA’s creative writing program, the department of English, and the College of Arts and Sciences.

For more information or to obtain a schedule of the 1999-2000 Bankhead events, contact the UA creative writing program at 205/348-0766.