Inprint Brown Reading Series: Natasha Trethewey and John Edgar Wideman

Today’s Inprint Brown Reading Series writers, poet Natasha Trethewey and novelist John Edgar Wideman, have different approaches to the African-American experience.

Trethewey, who grew up in Mississippi as the daughter of a white man and a black woman, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard, a collection of poetry. Native Guard reflects on her mother breaking the law in order to marry her husband and later carrying a mixed-race child. “This is 1966 — she is married to a white man — / and there are more names for what grows inside her. / It is enough to worry about words like mongrel / and the infertility of mules and mulattoes.” She also examines her own unresolved issues surrounding race. “Mississippi, state that made a crime of me — mulatto, half-breed, native — / in my native land, this place, they’ll bury me.”

Meanwhile, John Edgar Wideman, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship, presents his latest novel, Fanon, about psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, whose teachings inspired the Black Panthers and Che Guevara.

7:30 p.m. Alley Theatre, 615 Texas. For information, call 713-521-2026 or visit www.inprinthouston.org. $5.
Mon., Nov. 10, 7:30 p.m., 2008