TUSCUMBIA-Writers to Readers at the Helen Keller Public Library continues Sunday, March 10 in Tuscumbia with award-winning poets Jason McCall and Harry Moore. The free program begins at 2:00 p.m. and concludes by 3:30 p.m.
Both poets will read from their recent books and participate in a question/answer session afterwards with the audience. Dr. Donna Estill, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at J.C. Calhoun Community College, will moderate. A book sale and signing follows.
Jason McCall
A past Alabama State Council on the Arts Literature Fellow, McCall will read from his collections “Two-Face God” and “Mother, Less Child,” and Moore will read from his latest collection “Bearing the Farm Away” and new works.
A student of the classics, McCall said that he mixes contemporary issues and history/mythology in his poems because of his love of history. “I was a classics major in undergrad school, and I’ve always been interested in how ideas and influences move from one culture to the next. The poems in both of the books I’ll read from are about the fragility of the body…,” McCall said.
McCall, who writes moving poems about the death of young black people in America, says, “Parents have always cried over the bodies of their dead children. People have always hoped their bodies and names would be remembered in their hometowns. So a lot of my work is dedicated to how I notice this timeless trend in contemporary issues.”
Harry Moore
A long-time resident of Decatur, Moore said, “Bearing the Farm Away pulls together poems rooted in my upbringing on a rented cotton farm in East Central Alabama after World War II–work, play, church, family, and the hard reality of systemic racial inequality.” Commenting on his writing style he said, “The newer poems probe word histories–the way even common words, when they are scratched or cracked, give up surprising and sometimes incongruous DNA. Our daily conversation teems with primal images.”
Writers to Readers at the Helen Keller Public Library continues May 5 with poets James E. Cherry and Jacqueline Allen Trimble. It concludes June 28, during the annual Helen Keller Festival, with 2019 Harper Lee Award winning novelist Daniel Wallace and APTV BookMark host Don Noble for an evening event. 
The Alabama 200 endorsed series is made possible with support from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, Tuscumbia Kiwanis, Tuscumbia Civitans, and the Friends of the Helen Keller Public Library. The Alabama Writers’ Forum, Inc. is a cosponsor of the series. For information, call 256 383 7065 or visit www.writersforum.org
Media Release/Jeanie Thompson/Helen Keller Public Library
