Event
Boneyarn - The book of poems about slavery in NYC
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In this program, poet David Mills will read from and reflect upon the research behind his poetry collection, Boneyarn, the first-ever book of poems about slavery in New York City. The city holds the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the United States—the Negro Burial Ground—which was open from 1712 to 1795 and is located in Wall Street’s shadows. Fifteen thousand enslaved and free Blacks are buried there. For this reading, Mr. Mills will focus on the poems about enslaved women in his collection. But generally, Mills creatively “excavates” the tragedies and triumphs of New York’s enslaved and free Black community. He writes about those who toiled as cooks, childhood chimney sweeps, sailed the Atlantic, fought in the Revolutionary War, maintained African traditions when burying the dead, built the “wall” where Wall Street gets its name, and regrettably were dehumanized in life and sometimes desecrated in death. The collection also includes a suite of poems dedicated to Jupiter Hammon; born into slavery in New York, Hammon was the first Black poet published in North America.
David Mills holds an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and an M.A. from New York University in creative writing. He’s published four collections: Boneyarn (New York slavery poems, 2022 winner of the North American Book Award as well as a finalist for the Housatonic, Crab Orchard Review and Richard Snyder Memorial prize), After Mistic (Massachusetts slavery poems), and the bestsellers The Sudden Country and The Dream Detective. He has read poems from Boneyarn on WNYC and he and the Boneyarn poems have been featured in New York Newsday. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Fence, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Brooklyn Rail, and Obsidian. He has received fellowships from the Schomburg Library as a scholar-in-residence, New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, the American Antiquarian Society, Flushing Town Hall, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, Flushing Town Hall, the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize and Washington College. He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home for three years. He wrote the audio script for Macarthur Genius Award-winner Deborah Willis’s curated exhibition Reflections in Black: 100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney and Getty West Museums. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.
This event is free and open to the public, no reservation is necessary.