The Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Visiting Author Series launches Oct. 6, 2010

(Sam Cornish)








There is a new series on the North Shore at Endicott College directed by Somerville's Ibbetson Street press founder Doug Holder. Its title: "Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Visiting Author Series. " It will be held at the Halle Library on the beautiful, sea-breeze infused Endicott College campus in Beverly, Mass. The series is part of the new affiliation that the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville has formed with Endicott College. The first reader will be the first Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. It will be held at 4P.M. Open mic to follow. Open to the public. Help launch this new literary series at the "Hub of the Arts" on the North Shore.


For directions to Endicott go to the website http://endicott.edu




http://samcornish.com/interviews.htm his website is http://www.samcornish.com


Sam Cornish, poet, essayist, editor of children's literature, photographer, educator, and figure in the Black Arts movement. He is the first City of Boston Poet Laureate.

Cornish served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps (1958–1960), then returned to his native Baltimore, where he published two poetry collections—In This Corner: Sam Cornish and Verses (1961) and People Beneath the Window (1964). While working at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, he became part of Baltimore's political and literary underground, self-publishing a sixteen-page pamphlet entitled Generations and Other Poems (1964). A subsequent edition of Generations (1966) appeared when Cornish was editing Chicory, a literary magazine by children and young adults in the Community Action Target Area of Baltimore. Lucian W. Dixon and Cornish edited a selection from the magazine entitled Chicory: Young Voices from the Black Ghetto (1969). In 1968 Cornish won the Humanities Institute of Coppin State College Poetry Prize for his “influence on the Coppin poets” and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Soon poets as diverse as Maxine Kumin, Clarence Major, and Eugene Redmond would acknowledge Cornish's significance.

By 1970 Cornish was represented in the LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal anthology Black Fire (1968) as well as in the Clarence Major collection New Black Poetry (1969). He reconsidered his early poems of black historicized kinship, restructuring them into the Beacon Press's Generations (1971). After a brief stay in Boston, Cornish returned to Baltimore to work in secondary school and college writing programs. While there, Cornish published Sometimes (1973) with Cambridge's Pym-Randall Press. Teaching poetry in the schools led to several children's books: Your Hand in Mine (1970), Grandmother's Pictures (1974), and My Daddy's People (1976).

Returning to Boston in the mid-1970s, Cornish worked with the Educational Development Corporation and attended Goddard College in Vermont. He appeared in a host of new anthologies, from George Plimpton and Peter Ardery's American Literary Anthology (1970) and Harry Smith's Smith Poets (1971), to Ted Wilentz and Tom Weatherly's Natural Process (1972) and Arnold One Hundred Years of Black Poetry (1972). Sam's World (1978) continued the historical and genealogical project of Generations.

Since the 1980s Cornish has divided his time between bookselling and teaching creative writing and literature at Emerson College in Boston. Songs of Jubilee: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1983 (1986) recasts earlier work into sequences of a historical and biographical nature. His autobiographical narrative, 1935: A Memoir (1990), blends poetry and prose into a montage of twentieth-century history. The poems of Folks Like Me (1993) offer political and cultural portraits of African Americans from the depression to the early 1960s. Current projects include the next volume of his autobiography, 1955, and a critical study of Langston Hughes. His latest collection of poetry is an "Apron Full of Beans"