The Smell of Stories: Poetry as History
It all comes from this dark dirt,
memory as casual as a laborer.
-Kwame Dawes
Celebrate National Poetry Month with poet, budding historian, and former Ulster County Poet Laureate Kate Hymes. She has been laboring in the dark dirt of history, sifting through census records, church records, old newspapers, and family trees. Inspired by these fragments of the past, she breathes life into them through poetry, imaginatively fleshing out the lives and stories of 18th- and 19th-century people of African descent in Ulster County.
This reading will feature poems inspired by Hymes’ research into a thriving Black community in New Paltz, whose story is connected to the larger history of Ulster County. She will also read and discuss poems by other poets who recreate Black history through poetry.
No registration required, meet in the Community Room.
