Join us Monday, April 3 as award-winning poet Adrian Matejka announces the new class of Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners.
Matejka won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2014 for The Big Smoke, a marvelous, nuanced, polyphonic exploration of the life of boxer Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight world champion.
His latest work, Last on His Feet, is a graphic biography returning again to Johnson and his 1910 fight against Jim Jeffries, dubbed the “Battle of the Century.”
He’ll appear at the Cuyahoga County Public Library’s Parma-Snow branch to read selections from his work and announce the winners of the 88th Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
Adrian Matejka is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of four collections of poems, including The Big Smoke and Map to the Stars. His latest collection of poems is Somebody Else Sold the World, published in July 2021.
Matejka resumes the pre-pandemic tradition of bringing former winners to Cleveland to announce and celebrate the new class. Jericho Brown (2015, poetry) and Marlon James (2015, fiction) returned to Cleveland in 2019 and 2018, respectively, to make the announcement.
This event begins at 7 pm and is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of Mac’s Backs.
