Join us for this celebration of the life of Lucille Clifton. Poets from Baltimore and around the state will raise their voices to honor the memory of Clifton's life and works. We invite you to bring your favorite Lucille Clifton poem to share.

The Moderator was Marcy Kolodny leading a panel including: Ulysses D. Archie Jr., Kalman R. Hettleman and   Ben Shifrin.

Why Can't Grandma Read: Intergenerational Illiteracy in Baltimore was a conference presented by the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Reads, Inc., and the Dyslexia Tutoring Program.

Novella Carpenter grew up in Idaho and Washington, graduated from the University of Washington, and studied with Michael Pollan at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Her writing has appeared in Salon.com, Saveur.com, sfgate.com, and Mother Jones.

Pam Grier began her acting career and achieved fame in the early 1970s when she starred in a number of popular films including Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba Baby. In the 1980s, she worked alongside Paul Newman in Fort Apache: The Bronx, starred in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and earned an NAACP Image Award for Best Actress in a play, Fool for Love by Sam Shepard. In the 1990s her performance as the title character in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown earned her nominations for Best Actress from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild, and the NAACP Image Award in 1997.

Dr. Locke's appearance in Baltimore is sponsored by the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies and the Committee on Church Relations and the Holocaust, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Partners include: Associated Black Charities; THE ASSOCIATED: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore; Baltimore Community Foundation; and Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

Wes Moore wrote to the other Wes Moore in prison, the beginning of a deepening relationship consisting of letters and visits. Wes Moore served as an Army Officer in Afghanistan and worked as a special assistant to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He works as an investment professional in New York.

Joining editor Kim Roberts will be poets Holly Bass, Grace Cavalieri, Tina Darragh, Joel Dias-Porter, Daniel Gutstein, and Merrill Leffler. Hosted by Reginald Harris, poet and author of 10 Tongues.

Ronald C. White, Jr. is the author of two bestselling books on Abraham Lincoln: The Eloquent President and Lincoln's Greatest Speech, a New York Times Notable Book. White earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and has lectured on Lincoln at hundreds of universities and organizations, at Gettysburg and the White House. He is a Fellow at the Huntington Library and a visiting professor of history at UCLA.

www.ronaldcwhitejr.com

Thomas Espenshade, professor of sociology at Princeton University, pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive look at how race and social class impact application and admission, enrollment, and student life on campus. Based on data provided by the National Survey of College Experience and more than 9,000 student interviews, Espenshade and coauthor Alexandria Walton Radford discover that students from different racial and social classes do not mix as one might expect.

Howell S. Baum is professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland. He is the author most recently of Community Action for School Reform and The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning.

Part of "Talking About Race," a year-long speaker series, presented in partnership with Open Society Institute-Baltimore.

Thrity Umrigar's most recent novel is The Weight of Heaven, published in 2009. She is the author of three other novels -- The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time -- and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for 17 years, Umrigar is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University and a 2006 finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Ron Egatz, Beneath Stars Long Extinct (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE3DE103CF933A15750C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all);

John Murillo, Up Jump the Boogie (http://www.myspace.com/johnmurillo);

Paul Nelson, A Time Before Slaughter (http://www.americansentences.com/paul-nelson.html);

January G. O'Neil, Underlife (http://poetmom.blogspot.com/); and

Shelley Puhak, Stalin in Aruba (www.shelleypuhak.com)

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans -- employment and housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote and educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion of jury service.

Paul Butler's book, Let's Get Free: A Hip Hop Theory of Justice, offers a powerful new vision of justice. Americans live in a society fueled by fear and fettered by the lock-'em-up culture that dominates our criminal justice system; we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, yet our streets are no safer. Part memoir, part manifesto, Let's Get Free takes a fresh investigative look at the dysfunctional politics of our broken justice system and proposes a series of controversial solutions.

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander was a 2005 Soros Justice Fellow. She served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, and appeared as a commentator on CNN and MSNBC. She is currently a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

Paul Butler is a former federal prosecutor and the country's leading expert on jury nullification. He regularly provides commentary for CNN, NPR, and Fox News. He has been featured on 60 Minutes and profiled and published in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The Progressive. Butler is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. An award-winning law professor, he now teaches in the areas of criminal law, civil rights, and jurisprudence at George Washington University.

Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century. The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II and into the first decade of the 21st century. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.

Antero Pietila spent 35 years as a reporter with the Baltimore Sun, most of it covering the city's neighborhoods, politics, and government. A native of Finland, he became a student of racial change during his first visit to the United States in 1964.

Jabari Asim is the author of What Obama Means, The N Word, and several books for children. He is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Illinois and editor-in-chief of The Crisis. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Essence, Ebony, and other publications. He recently was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Dr. John A. Rich is the chair of and a professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, where he is also the director of the Center of Academic Public Health Practice. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 and is the former medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission and the Young Men's Health Clinic in Boston.

Joining Dr. Rich at this program: Roy Martin, a senior youth development specialist in the Youth Development Network, Boston Public Health Commission. He helps connect young men with health and social services they desperately need. Previously Martin worked as a network manager and constituent services manager in the office of Senator John Kerry. Martin combines his wisdom from the streets with his passion for social justice to help young men survive and heal from the trauma of their lives.

Connie May Fowler is an award-wining novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. She is the author of seven books, including her new novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, which will be released in April. Her books have received the Chautauqua South Literary Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Francis Buck Award; three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. (www.conniemayfowler.com)

Iris Gomez is the author of two poetry collections, Housicwhissick Blue and When Comets Rained, which earned a prestigious national poetry prize from the University of California. Originally from Colombia, she is a public interest immigration lawyer and law school lecturer. Her novel, Try to Remember, will be released in May. (www.irisgomez.com)

Elizabeth Nunez is the author of seven novels, inlcuding Prospero's Daughter (New York Times Editors' Choice) and Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award). She is coeditor, with Jennifer Sparrow, of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. (http://aalbc.com/authors/elizabet.htm)

Dolen Perkins-Valdez's fiction and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, African American Review, and other publications. A former George McCandlish Fellow in American Literature at George Washington University, Dolen was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Short Fiction prize. Wench is her first novel. (www.dolenperkinsvaldez.com)

Tiphanie Yanique is from the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University and an associate editor with Post-No-Ills. (http://tiphanieyanique.blogspot.com/)

Program partners:
 

Former Baltimore County executive, Ted Venetoulis currently serves as chairman and CEO of Corridor Media, Inc., a regional business and political news magazine serving the Baltimore Washington corridor. He has taught courses on politics and the media at Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College. Venetoulis has been the leader of efforts to return the Baltimore Sun to local ownership and is recognized nationally for his knowledge of the various approaches to restructuring and salvaging the newspaper industry.

Jerald Walker is an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a teaching/writing fellow and James A. Michener Fellow. His work has appeared in Mother Jones, Best African American Essays: 2009, and Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry. 

In the mid-1880s, Levy landed not at Ellis Island, but at Baltimore where he soon became a successful businessman and prominent socialist leader. New and her daughter Yael set out to research their family history, from Lithuania to Baltimore to London, and in the process unlocked family mysteries and explained the etching on Jacob Levy's cane.

Elisa New is professor of English and American literature at Harvard University and the author of The Line's Eye and The Regenerate Lyric.

Corbett is the author of Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express and Vacationland. He writes the popular "Back Page" column for Style magazine and teaches at UMBC.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War was named "one of the 10 best books of 2009" by Publishers Weekly.

In her book, she discusses the widespread use of criminal informants, the legal, cultural and political consequences, from street to drug crime to Hip Hop music, the FBI, and terrorism.

Natapoff served as assistant federal public defender in Baltimore from 1998 to 2003.