USM Distinguished Professor Emeritus Kolin Publishes Book of Poems on Black History

Thu, 02/15/2024 - 09:24am | By: David Tisdale

Dr. Philip Kolin, a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) has commemorated Black History Month 2024 with a new collection of poems, White Terror, Black Trauma: Resistance Poems about Black History, published by Third World Press, the oldest independent publisher in the U.S. of Black thought and literature.

The 61 poems in Dr. Kolin's new book concentrate on some of the most harrowing events in Black history in America from 1619 with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the murders of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Its poems also focus on such well-known historical figures as Dred Scott, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Kolin’s collection also includes poems on the countless lynchings, massacres and other injustices inflicted upon African Americans throughout history, such as at Port Pillow during the Civil War; Tulsa's “Black Wall Street” incident; the Tuskegee Experiments; the attacks in Birmingham, Ala. ("Bombingham"); the martyrdom of the Mother Emanuel Church worshippers in South Carolina; and the efforts of the Freedom Riders, among many others.

"Some poems are written in the third person; others in the first person recounting the speaker's recollection of a specific historical event,” Dr. Kolin explained. “Individually, the poems are eulogies, jeremiads, dramatic monologues, and rituals. Collectively, they are accounts of activists fighting against segregation, voter suppression, and Jim Crow injustice."

Dr. Haki Madhubuti, a founder of the Black Arts Movement, noted in his introduction that Dr. Kolin's collection is "an important and critically necessary book for our times" and honored him as “an excellent researcher of African American history and culture, and a superior poet.” Illinois Poet Laureate Angela Jackson also remarked that "Kolin's writing is like a fist and a song. His witness is relentless, wise and omniscient."

Dr. Kolin, who has published more than 40 books, 15 of them collections of his poetry, is the former editor of USM’s The Southern Quarterly. He is also an internationally recognized scholar of the work of famed American author Tennessee Wiliams and has served a general editor for the Routledge Shakespeare Criticism series.

Copies of White Terror, Black Trauma can be ordered from Third World Press.