Kim Roberts | |
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 Kim Roberts, 2019 | |
| Born | Charlotte, North Carolina United States |
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| Nationality | American |
| Education | Emerson College; University of Arizona |
Kim Roberts (born 1961) is an American poet, editor, and literary historian who lives in Washington, D.C.
Roberts was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. She received a BFA from Emerson College and an MFA from the University of Arizona.
She is the editor of the anthologies By Broad Potomac's Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation's Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), [1] and Full Moon On K Street: Poems About Washington DC (Plan B Press, 2010), [2] and author of five books of poetry, including The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017), Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions, 2011), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994). The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press/Poetry Mutual, 2007) is a book-length poem that chronicles her experiences during a period of residence in India. [3] Fortune's Favor: Scott In Antarctica (Poetry Mutual Press, 2015) is a book-length poem based on the journals of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, whose Terra Nova Expedition was the second to reach the South Pole in 1912. [4] Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals throughout the US, and internationally. [5]
Roberts is also the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018). [6] With Dan Vera, she co-curates the web exhibit DC Writers' Homes, [7] sponsored by Humanities DC.
She is the founder of two literary journals. She established Beltway Poetry Quarterly [8] [9] in January 2000, and served as editor for twenty years, through January 2020. She co-founded the Delaware Poetry Review in 2007 (which published through 2017).
Roberts has seen her work adapted to music by Arc of Ones, as well as by classical composer Daron Aric Hagen. [10] Several poems have been choreographed by Jane Franklin Dance Company and performed at various venues including the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. [11] Roberts' science and poetry workshops at the 2017 March for Science were featured in The New York Times Opinion page [12] and the title poem of her book The Scientific Method was included at the march as part of "Science Stanzas," sponsored by the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. [13] She has been featured in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Project, and in podcasts sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts, and individual poems of hers have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin.
Washington, D.C. is the source of much inspiration for Roberts. She has developed numerous tours for schools, community groups, and Big Read celebrations highlighting the literary and cultural history of the city. Roberts frequently leads walking tours of the Harlem Renaissance-era writers in the greater U Street neighborhood. [14] Roberts's research on Walt Whitman's decade in residence of Washington, DC was featured in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, as well as being referenced in subsequent articles in The Washington Post and The Washington Times, featured on radio essays on stations WAMU and WPFW, and on panels for Whitman conferences at Rutgers University, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and at the annual Washington Historical Studies Conference. Roberts was the Festival Director of the "Walt Whitman 200 Festival" in 2019, sponsored by Humanities DC, and Coordinator of the 2005 city-wide festival, "DC Celebrates Whitman: 150 Years of Leaves of Grass ." Roberts has presented "The Rise of DC's Black Intelligentsia: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson in LeDroit Park" and "Henry Adams in Lafayette Square" at DC Historical Studies Conferences. [15] [16] Her projects have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Humanities DC, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, [17] the District of Columbia Public Library, and a Rose Research Fellowship at Emory University.
Roberts is the winner of the 2009 Pearl Poetry Prize for her manuscript, Animal Magnetism. [18] In 2010, she won the Washington Online Award for "Contributions to the DC Literary Community." In 2008, she was awarded an Independent Voice Award from the Capital BookFest. [19] Roberts is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and Humanities DC. [20] She has been awarded writer's residencies at eighteen artist colonies across the United States, including Art Omi International Arts Center, the Pine Needles Fellowship from the Science Museum of Minnesota, [21] the Edward Albee Foundation, [22] the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ucross Foundation.
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Sterling Allen Brown was an American professor, folklorist, poet, and literary critic. He chiefly studied black culture of the Southern United States and was a professor at Howard University for most of his career. Brown was the first Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia.
Helene Johnson was an African-American poet during the Harlem Renaissance. She is remembered today for her poetry that captures both the challenges and the excitement of this era during her short-lived career.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 2005 American television drama film based upon Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel of the same name. The film was directed by Darnell Martin, written by Suzan-Lori Parks, Misan Sagay, and Bobby Smith Jr., and produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. It stars Halle Berry, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Michael Ealy, and aired on ABC on March 6, 2005.
Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta was an American poet, writer, teacher and socialite whose home was the central gathering place of the literary elite of her era.
Cheryl A. Wall was a literary critic and professor of English at Rutgers University. One of the first black women to head an English department at a major research university, she worked for diversity in the literary canon as well as in the classroom. She specialized in black women's writing, particularly the Harlem Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston. She edited several volumes of Hurston's writings for the Library of America. She was also a section editor for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and was on the editorial boards of American Literature, African American Review and Signs. An award-winning researcher and teacher, she was named the Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor in 2007.
Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, and also known as Cudjo Lewis, was the third to last adult survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States. Together with 115 other African captives, he was brought to the United States on board the ship Clotilda in 1860. The captives were landed in backwaters of the Mobile River near Mobile, Alabama, and hidden from authorities. The ship was scuttled to evade discovery, and remained undiscovered until May 2019.
Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue. As a result, the novel has been classified as a composite novel or as a short story cycle. Though some characters and situations recur between vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details.
Anas "Andy" Shallal is an Iraqi-American artist, activist, philanthropist and entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Washington, D.C., area restaurant, bookstore, and performance venue Busboys and Poets. He is also known for his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was a candidate for the city's mayoral election in 2014.
Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright, and radio host of the Library of Congress program The Poet and the Poem. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland.
Marita Golden is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.
Afaa Michael Weaver, formerly known as Michael S. Weaver, is an American poet, short-story writer, and editor. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, and his honors include a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Foundation, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is the Director of the Writing Intensive at The Frost Place.
Valerie Boyd was an American writer and academic. She was best known for her biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she taught narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism.
Karla Francesca Holloway is an American academic. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in the Duke University School of Law as well as the university's Department of English, Department of African & African American Studies, and Program in Women's Studies.
The Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, also known as The Hurston, is an art museum in Eatonville, Florida. The Hurston is named after Zora Neale Hurston, an African-American writer, folklorist, and anthropologist who moved to Eatonville at a young age and whose father became mayor of Eatonville in 1897. The museum's exhibits are centered on individuals of African descent, from the diaspora and the United States. The Hurston features exhibitions quarterly to highlight emerging artists.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" is a non-fiction work by Zora Neale Hurston. It is based on her interviews in 1927 with Oluale Kossola who was presumed to be the last survivor of the Middle Passage. Two female survivors were subsequently recognized but Cudjoe continued to be identified as the last living person with clear memories of life in Africa before passage and enslavement.
The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation is an American literary nonprofit organization that supports the development and careers of Black writers. The Foundation provides classes, workshops, an annual conference, and offers the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the North Star Award, among others. Writer Marita Golden and cultural historian Clyde McElvene founded the organization in 1990.
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