Award-winning poet Tim Seibles (above) and best selling author/graphic novelist Mat Johnson (below) wrap up this season’s Visiting Writers program at Brookdale tonight.
A poet and a graphic novelist walk into a room — and for tonight’s final entry in the fall 2015 series of Visiting Writers events on the Lincroft campus, Brookdale Community College sets up a double-header event that hits the holiday-break interlude on a high note.
Featured is Tim Seibles, whose five volumes of verse have won him accolades from his peers (and, in the case of Fast Animal, placed him squarely in the running for no less an honor than the National Book Award).
The Philly-born wordsmith and educator addresses serious topics like racial and class tensions “from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness,” he says.
Seible, whose works have been said to “invoke the fast-flipping frames of Hanna-Barbara animation,” is paired at BCC’s Student Life Center with a fellow African-American artist who inhabits the worlds of fine literature and popular culture to equal effect: Mat Johnson.
Johnson is the author of four novels and one “nonfiction novella” (The Great Negro Plot) that uses a fact-based, racially charged furor in 18th-century New York City to make some stunning points about the conspiracy-crazed, media-mad, rush-to-judgment times we live in today. He’s also a frequent contributor to DC Comics’ Vertigo line of adult-audience comics, for whom he scripted the Constantine: Hellblazer miniseries Papa Midnite, as well as a trio of deeply devastating stand-alones: Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery, the political thriller Right State, and Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story. A frequent lecturer on the topic of comic books and their evolution, Johnson will read from selections that include his most recent novel, Loving Day.
Tonight’s 7 p.m. presentation is free of charge and open to the public, with complimentary refreshments available and donations welcomed to Brookdale’s creative writing program. Call (732) 224-2650 or email [email protected] for more information.
