More than 100 spectators spilled into the Edison O. Jackson Auditorium at Medgar Evers College to attend the launch of Crown Heights Review, a literary journal from Evers’s English Department. The event featured top-ranking literary star Tyehimba Jess, last year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
As Mr. Jess read from his poetry collection, “Olio,” one could sense that his words had an especially deep impact on the guests on hand. Students were visibly moved after hearing Mr. Jess’s unparalleled bring-back-to-life poetry about Millie and Christine McKoy, two conjoined twins who were traveling artists, as well as slaves.The following excerpt from “Mille McKoy & Christien McKoy Recall Meeting Blind Tom, 1877” is from the work:
The “syncopated sonnets” as Mr. Jess calls his five poems about the McKoy sisters, is long on passion, strong on the black experience, and to people in the hall, it was electrifying.
“I am glad to have had the opportunity to hear Tyehimba Jess,” said Jean Emmanuel, a 20-year-old student at the college. “We’re very lucky to have him here.”
Student contributors to the Crown Heights Review also read focused and challenging poems that had applicability, even if implicitly, in relation to a man fatally shot by the police last week in Crown Heights or the president’s recent insult of Myrlie Evers, wife of Medgar Evers, one of the greats of the civil rights movement and the namesake of the college.
It is patently obvious that this lit mag publication will have an incalculable effect locally on the creative writing community going forward.
