Las Vegas Weekly

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Black Mountain Institute keeps its mission to promote cross-cultural dialogue as it celebrates National Poetry Month with two events and four stellar writers sharing their words and processes.

Uwem Akpan, Daniel Brook and Mary-Ann Tirone Smith discuss their work and residencies at UNLV on April 14. Loaded with honors, fellowships and accolades, they’ve shared perspectives from different worlds— children facing violence, religious conflicts and poverty in Africa (Say You’re One of Them by Akpan, a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest), debt-ridden liberals joining corporate America (Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America) and growing up with a serial killer on the loose in Hartford, Connecticut (Smith’s Girls of Tender Age).

Also, don’t miss the April 20 reading by C.D. Wright, UNLV’s 2011 Ghanem Chair in creative writing. Books by the Ozarks-born Brown University English professor include One with Others, winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, a personal story of race and relationships in 1960s Arkansas; Rising, Falling, Hovering, which ruminates on the American attitude toward other countries and Steal Away: Selected and New Poems, covering Wright’s trek from the Deep South to New England.