Valentine’s Day is this coming Tuesday, do you have plans? Well, you do now!

On Tuesday, February 14th, please join the celebrated poet Haki Madhubuti and our gifted colleague Amina Gautier for an evening entitled “Liberation Through Literature.” Co-sponsored by African and Black Diaspora Studies and the Department of English, the  program takes place from 6-8 p.m. in room 103 of the Arts & Letters Building.

As a poet, publisher, editor and educator, Haki R. Madhubuti has been a pivotal figure in the development of a strong Black literary tradition, emerging from the Civil Rights and Black Arts era of the 60s and continuing to the present. Over the years, he has published more than 28 books (some under his former name, Don L. Lee). In 1967, Dr. Madhubuti founded Third World Press, currently the largest independent black-owned press in the United States. He is also the founder of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University.

An assistant professor of English at DePaul, Amina Gautier is the author of At-Risk, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.  Her work has appeared in the anthologies Best African American Fiction and New Stories from the South and in numerous literary journals including Antioch Review, North American Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and Southern Review.

Last week’s reading by DePaul faculty poets Chris Green, Kathleen Rooney, David Welch and Mark Turcotte was a wild success. The event drew over 100 people to the DePaul Art Museum–the second time a Visiting Writers program has had a standing-room-only crowd this academic year. Thank you to everyone who made it happen, and we hope to see you all again on February 14th!