Audiences will have a chance to meet, greet and hear East St. Louis Poet Laureate Eugene B. Redmond relive four decades of poetry and publishing next Wednesday in Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Elijah P. Lovejoy Library.
The gathering is an opportunity to commemorate the 40th Anniversary since Redmond was appointed Poet Laureate of East St. Louis.
The free public event will be hosted by Darlene Roy, a poet, retired social services administrator and president of the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, now in its 30th year.
On that poetic day in August 1976, dancers/drummers from Katherine Dunham’s Performing Arts Training Center electrified a Lincoln Park audience. Mayors from surrounding cities and the president pro-tem of the Illinois State Senate mingled with a throng of locals, nationals and globals. Redmond’s friend and fellow poet Quincy Troupe, a St. Louis native based in New York, was there to help honor EBR as ESL’s first poet laureate.
Appointed by Dr. William Mason, then-mayor of the city, Redmond’s was among the earliest known poet laureateships conferred by an American municipality.
At the time, Redmond was a professor of English and poet-in-residence in Ethnic and Pan African Studies at California State University-Sacramento, a position he held for nearly 15 years. Later that fall (1976) Doubleday Publishing Co. released his pioneering and influential book, “Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (A Critical History),” which was nine years in the making. That same year, he received CSUS-Sacramento’s Annual Outstanding Faculty Research Award.
For his efforts as a teacher and author or editor of dozens of books and journals, including 48 years of shepherding the writings of Henry Dumas (1934-1968) into publication, Redmond has won a Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (1976), a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Sterling Brown Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society (AACLS) of the American Literature Association (ALA), two American Book Awards (1993/2012) and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from SIUE (2008), his alma mater. He retired from SIUE in 2007 as an Emeritus Professor of English.
The poet, a 1957 graduate of ESL Lincoln Senior High School, has taught at Oberlin College (Ohio), Webster University (STL), Southern University (Baton Rouge), the University of Wisconsin (Madison), the University of Missouri (St. Louis) and Wayne State University in Detroit. He has lectured or read poetry at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Howard University, the Universities of Lagos and Ibadan in Nigeria, the University of the West Indies, the University of Paris II Sorbonne Nouvelle, the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta and the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
In 1986, after he returned home to ESL, a group of local writers, scholars and artists established the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club in his honor.
For two decades, beginning in the early 1990’s, the ESL-based Club co-published a literary-cultural journal,“Drumvoices Revue,” with SIUE. Former Club trustees include late poets Margaret Walker Alexander (1915-1998), Maya Angelou (1928-2014), Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Raymond R. Patterson (1929-2001) and ESL native daughter Barbara Ann Teer (1937-2008). Current trustees are Troupe, Avery Brooks, Haki R. Madhubuti, Walter Mosley, Jerry Ward, Jr. and Dr. Lena Weathers.
Dr. Eugene B. Redmond will be honored or his 40 years of service as Poet Laureate at 1 pm. On Wednesday, August 17 in Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Elijah P. Lovejoy Library, 30 Hairpin Drive, Edwardsville, IL 62026. The program will be held in the EBR Learning Center on the library’s second floor. For more information call (618) 650-3991, write c/o EBR Writers Club at P.O. Box 6165, East St. Louis, IL 62201 or email eredmon@siue.edu.
