All Black Woman Everything: Black Arts and Freedom Dreams, Featuring Angela Jackson

All Black Woman Everything: Black Arts and Freedom Dreams, Featuring Angela Jackson

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Award-winning writer Angela Jackson will invoke the poetry of the late Carolyn Rodgers to honor her work and contributions to to the black arts movement. Together, Jackson and Rodgers worked with other African American artists during the civil rights era to organize cultural and artistic expression in support of struggles for freedom, justice, and equality.

Angela Jackson will be joined by visual artist and poet Krista Franklin to explore black arts, past and present, and freedom dreams in the 21st century. Join us for readings, performances, and a special presentation to celebrate the creativity of Rodgers and all black women artists.

Blanc Gallery’s current exhibit, Dreams in Jay-Z Minor: New works from Amanda Williams + Krista Franklin, explores the illusion of the black American dream and elucidates discussions on black opulence, excellence, and excess.

Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, author, and playwright. In 1969, she began writing poetry about the black experience and hasn’t stopped writing since. Her books of poems include Voo Doo/Love Magic, Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners, and And All These Roads Be Luminous. Her plays include Witness!, Shango Diaspora: An African American Myth of Womanhood and Love, and When the Wind Blows. Jackson’s latest work, Where I Must Go, is her first novel. Jackson has been winning awards for her writing since 1973, including six Illinois Arts Council awards, the Pushcart Prize, and the American Book Award, among many others.

Krista Franklin is a poet and visual artist from Dayton, Ohio, who lives and works in Chicago. Her poetry and mixed medium collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Coon Bidness, Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, and Callaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. II, F-K and Gathering Ground. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Franklin is a Cave Canem Fellow, a teaching artist for Young Chicago Authors and Neighborhood Writing Alliance, and a cofounder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual, and performance artists, musicians and scholars.

This program is presented by The Public Square, Young Chicago Authors, and Blanc Gallery.