Hearing Voices with Jessie Adolph and Evelyn Somers

Join us at Orr Street Studios at 7:30 p.m.* Tuesday, April 24, for readings of fiction by Evelyn Somers and poetry by Jessie Adolph.

*Note the later start time.

Please join us before the reading for a performance, reading and reception with visiting poet Toi Derricotte, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Berlin Theatre. The theater is located inside Cafe Berlin at 220 North 10th St., one block from Orr Street Studios.

JESSIE ADOLPH

Jessie Adolph earned a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in Africana Studies from Central Missouri State University, where he participated in the McNair Scholarship program. His undergraduate thesis, "Bronzeville: The Chicago Renaissance," was presented at two research conferences, and he was invited to participate in the SREB: Compact for Minority Scholars and Future Faculty Members. At the national Black Graduate Student Conference he presented the paper "Sankofic Rememorization," which examines how hip-hop poets utilize motifs from slave and postslavery oral traditions to reverse the western gaze of othering.

He earned the Kenneth Davis Folklore Award for his essay "The Influence of Black Sermonic Discourse on Black Arts Movement and the Hip-hop Generation."

Adolph has performed original spoken-word poetry at events such as the Missouri Black Expo, and his poetry has appeared in publications including Spokenvizions magazine. He recently wrote the afterword to internationally known poet Jessica Care Moore's latest book, "God Is Not An American." 

 

After a year of teaching in a Columbia public high school, Adolph is returning to his role as a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, where he has taught freshmen composition using hip-hop culture. 

EVELYN SOMERS

 Evelyn Somers’s fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Crazyhorse, Many Mountains Moving, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Georgia Review and Pank and is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and Cedars.  


She has been associate editor of The Missouri Review for more than 20 years.

Books she has edited as a freelancer have won the John Simmons award for short fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Peter Taylor prize for the novel and have been published by both university presses, small presses larger, commercial houses in the United States and abroad.

Somers received a Barbara Deming Foundation grant for her first novel, Preacher’s House, for which she is seeking a publisher. A second novel is in progress. 

She recently completed a collection of sometimes eccentric, sometimes feminist stories.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us every Tuesday evening during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.