An open mic and reading with poet Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Date: Sunday, May 22nd
Time: 7 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society

In his latest poetry collection Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor, poet and choreographer Jaamil Olawale Kosoko brings into focus the harsh realities of growing up on the streets of Detroit.

An awkward, anti-social, 90’s kid, forced to deal with an absent father, a mentally disabled mother, and an uncle dying from AIDS (all the while looking after his infant brother), he must take all the traumatic experiences of his childhood and refocus them into the determination he needs to survive.

Join us at 7 for an open mic, followed by a reading from Jaamil’s latest work. Then stay for a discussion of the book—and a celebration of the human body and its many intersections with words and with change.

From the foreword by Miguel Gutierrez:

Childhood is a house of horrors, a butcher shop. This much we can be sure of from Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Notes on an Urban-Kill Floor. Bodies, which in our current cultural climate are to be made beautiful, preened, slimmed down and strong, are instead here containers of turbulence and agony that must be cut, carved, mended, healed.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, a 2011 Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo, among other publications. He has been a guest poet at various universities and high schools throughout the United States. In 2009, Kosoko published Animal in Cyberspace (Old City Publishing). He is a contributing writer for Dance Journal and the Broad Street Review in Philadelphia. Jaamil is also the founder and Producing Executive Director of Kosoko Performance Group.