Lamont B. Steptoe with Aaren Yeatts Perry & Quincy Scott Jones

Tuesday December 4, 7pm

Moonstone Poetry Series Presents Mentor and Mentored

Lamont B. Steptoe with Aaren Yeatts Perry and Quincy Scott Jones

Lamont B. Steptoe author of Meditations in “Congo Square” ($11.95 Whirlwind Press) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and/r editor of fifteen poetry collections, the latest of which is Meditations in Congo Square, and publish/founder of Whirlwind Press. He is the winner of an American Book Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

“Most poets are simply that. Sonia Sanchez and Lamont B. Steptoe answer to a higher calling: Prophecy! In Meditations… Steptoe is the Necromancer, translating the language of the dead to the living, whether they be the recently departed or Ante-Bellum spirits. While our age of obesity, self-gratification, and credit cards whistles past the graveyard, Lamont reads this burial ground like an Alufaa would read cowrie shells. Yes, there is the Philadelphia of Brotherly love, the old Quaker City that infuriated George Washington by offering refuge to fugitive slaves, but there is the other Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly death, whose atrocities are still being unearthed. Lamont B. Steptoe is the poet of this hidden Philadelphia. His brother – Philadelphia poet of death, Edgar Allen Poe – would be proud.” – Ishmael Reed

Quincy Scott Jones earned his Bachelor’s degree from Brown University, Master’s degree from Temple University, and $100 once working as supermarket clown. His work has appeared in such anthologies as Heroics, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth and Let Loose on the World: Celebrating Amiri Baraka at 75. He is involved with Arcadia University’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Concentration and M.F.A. program. With Nina Sharma Jones he co-created the Nor’easter Exchange:  a multicultural, multi-city reading series.   His first book, The T-Bone Series, was published by Whirlwind Press in 2009.

Aaren Yeatts Perry has performed his poems t the Nuyorican, Kimmel Center, World Café, Fringe Festival, Kelly Writers House and the Philadelphia Writers Conference along with countless stages and classrooms across America. With his consulting firm, Education Action Resources, he taught nonviolence and writing workshops to all ages at schools and colleges on the East Coast and in the Midwest for 20 years. Since 2004, he is a global organizational development consultant. Perry is published in various literary magazines. His work appeared on NPR and regional television. He produced and directed Page2Stage, a long-running all-poetry TV show on Cable. Student, Husband, Father, Capoerista, Shambhala warrior — his work spans genres and decades. Bilingual and with an MFA from Vermont College, he received a PA Council on the Arts Grant. His collections include Open Fire, Poetry Across the Curriculum: An Action Guide for Elementary Teachers, and a spokenword CD, Mercury  Calling, available at the reading.

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