JERICHO BROWN VISITS HOWARD UNIVERSITY     

 

By: Becca Rayehanatou Haynesworth

 

“The responsibility of the writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him”. In the words of our esteemed ancestor, James Baldwin, we are reminded greatly of the collaborative duty a writer must bear in order to remain useful and relevant to their people. On September 16th, 2024, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown visited Howard University’s campus for a literary talk with Dr. Dana A. Williams, Dean of the Graduate School. A professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Brown came to Howard’s campus to celebrate the publication of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, which he edited with Dean Williams and Darlene R. Taylor, Master Instructor and faculty advisor to The Amistad. Brown’s visit to the campus was filmed as part of the announcement of his receipt of the 2024 MacArthur Foundation Prize in Literature, the genius grant announced later that week. 

 

“I am very proud of this book,” Brown said to the audience of First-Year Writing Program and Creative Writing students and faculty who gathered in the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall library. Brown explained the uniqueness of the groupings of the more than three dozen essays and the non-genre specific headings such as Who Your People? Where You At? What You Got? What It Look Like? and How You Living? To those writerly questions, Brown said, “This is a book of answers —answers to questions new writers ask every day about how to produce writing that proves their very identity… this is a book for anyone who is a student of the craft… this is a book for younger and newer Black writers,” he said.  How We Do It had nonconventional goals. The contributors were directed to deconstruct their writing process and Brown explained, “how they go about making what they make.” He noted much-celebrated writers who contributed their time and words as “a gift from one writer to another” as they explained how they moved from a blank page to a story or poem. Nikki Giovanni and Elizabeth Nunez, literary voices lost to us in 2024 contributed to the anthology. Howard University professors Curdella Forbes, Tony Medina, and Tricia Elam Walker authored essays that shared approaches to characterization, dialogue, language, and form.

 

Brown shared his journey as a writer and encouraged students to courageously write the truth. In writing truth, he asserted that a writer cannot avoid issues of justice, equity, and freedom. As Brown read his poem “Bullet Points,” his insistence on writing truth was clear. The speaker illuminated the repeated violence against Black bodies and recalled news reports of Black men and women killed by police. Brown said the inspirations for the repeated denials of self-harm were the reported suicides of Jesus Huerta, Victor White III, and Sandra Bland while in police custody. The opening lines of Bullet Points rejected claims that the victims committed suicide:

 

I will not shoot myself

In the head, and I will not shoot myself

In the back, and I will not hang myself

With a trashbag…

 

Voicing these lines Brown demonstrated the power of poetry to tell the truth, question, refuse, and resist. However, getting to that truth suggested the lessons the poet sought through craft, skill, voice, the tools shared by the anthology writers. 

 

For those in attendance, Brown’s mastery captivated and encouraged. He suggested that writing was less of a “work thing” and moreso a passion, one that requires a great deal of nurturing and consistency to sustain itself. In another reading of his poetry, Brown honored the late Donny Hathaway, a Grammy-award winning master musician and former Howard University student. Hathaway sang and played piano alongside another talented alum Roberta Flack. Again, Brown paid tribute to the legacy of Black creativity and transcended the written word into an intense, living entity. 

 

Check out Brown’s acknowledgement of the MacArthur Foundation award here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsY5nAXUEpQ 

 

 

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About the Writer: Becca Rayehanatou Haynesworth

Becca is a Staff Writer and Poetry Editor at The Amistad.  She is a senior Media Management Major, pursuing a double minor in Africana Studies and Economics at Howard University. As a community organizer, student of African ancestral knowledge, and writer, Becca infuses African historical memory, Pan-African sentiments, and anti-colonial politic into her creative works. She is currently writing her first book, an Afro-futurist novel informed by archival research and ethnography, entitled Chicago.  The story re-imagines historic resistance movements and sites of marronage across the African Diaspora and on the African continent. Becca was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina.