Award-winning Poet Participates in MLK Celebration

Chezia Thompson Cager, award-winning poet and editor of the Diva Squad Poetry Collective series, will give a poetry reading 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 1, in 1005 Constant Hall as part of a joint Old Dominion University celebration commemorating the death of Martin Luther King Jr. A reception will precede the event, which is free and open to the public, at 4:30 p.m.

The ODU National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice, in conjunction with the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, the Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Department of Women's Studies, are sponsoring the "Taking the First Step, When You Can't Even See the Whole Staircase: Poetry, MLK Aphorisms and the Struggle Toward Humanism in the Poetry of Chezia Thompson Cager" reading in commemoration of King's death and the impact of his life on attempts to develop viable strategies to actualize an American humanism.

"Articulating the language of poetry (which is the language of the mind) is the process of walking in a blinding light down ever enlightening steps to arrive at the crossroads of the defining moment of change, when you know what you know for real and have to decide to act," Thompson Cager said.

Thompson Cager served as the Distinguished Poet-Scholar in residence at Towson University from 2006-08 and is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the 2005 Legacy Award from Baltimore's Poetry for the People Coalition and a 2002 Bread Loaf tuition grant. Her 2009 work will appear in publications such as Gargoyle Magazine (Maryland/D.C.), Stand (England), Black Orchard (Mississippi) and Sentence (New England).

For more information about the Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, go to http://al.odu.edu/isre.