The United Ministry Center is holding an open mic session for poets, musicians, and storytellers on Friday, Nov. 19th at 7:00 pm

A little background.
The United Ministry Center is home to The Bridge, a social justice student organization, and the OU Racial Awareness Program.  The Bridge has hosted speakers in the past on a range of political issues, including a packed panel discussion on Same Sex Marriage earlier this semester in Meacham Auditorium, and poet of the people Jimmy Santiago Baca.  OU RAP is best known for being responsible for the speakers on Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration day.  This past January, we hosted Dr. Walter Earl Fluker, and the year before we hosted Dr. James Forbes, Jr. from Riverside Church in New York.

I believe language is important and can change lives, as I have seen activists reach out to people with poetry.  I love all forms of poetry.

Professor Honoree Jeffers from the English dept will be a featured poet.  Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Asst. Professor of English, is the author of two books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State University, 2000), which won the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry and was the finalist for the 2001 Paterson Poetry, and Outlandish Blues, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2003. She has won the 2002 Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, and awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Prof. Jeffers' work recently has appeared in Black Issues Book Review, Black Warrior Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Liter ature, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Crown, 2001), Callaloo, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Warner/Aspect, 2000), Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political B
lack Literature and Art (Third World, 2002), and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (Sarabande 2002). She is at work on a third book of poetry and her first book of collected fiction.

Hope to see you there!  Give us a call!

Diana Williston, intern
United Ministry Center
1017 Elm (one block south of Lindsey)
321-8682