1455’s Author Series continues virtually with Sean Murphy, who will read from his new collection The Blackened Blues.
The Blackened Blues, which Dr. Cornel West has called “a powerful and beautiful collection of poems,” is a searing and timely take on American culture that finds perspective on the present by interrogating our past. The Blackened Blues offers a powerful glimpse into the human psyche, exploring the minds of artists and visionaries, addicts and trauma survivors, searching (as we all are) for “some way to live.” We leave this book with a heavy dose of truth, but also of the kind of beauty that makes such truth bearable.
These poems are part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of the author’s personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing this collection, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. The Blackened Blues seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage. More info and blurbs via Finishing Line Press.
Purchase The Blackened Blues
1455 is thrilled to partner with The Potter’s House bookshop.
Event Details
August 31 | 7:00 PM | FREE EVENT
1455 Board Member and poet Justen Ahren (author of A Machine for Remembering and former Director of the Noepe Center for Literary Arts on Martha’s Vineyard) will speak with Sean about this collection, including how several of the poems were written at Noepe, where Sean served as the 2016 writer in residence. Attendees are encouraged to submit questions prior to or during the conversation. Submit your questions ahead of time by emailing info@1455litarts.org
Tune into this event on Facebook at the event time to watch the live stream!
About Sean Murphy
Sean Murphy has been publishing fiction, poetry, reviews (of music, movie, book, food), and essays on the technology industry for more than twenty years. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Forbes, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize two times, once for short fiction and once for poetry. His poems have been widely anthologized, including the collections Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, This Is What America Looks Like, Lo-Fi Poetry Series: Poet Sounds, and Written in Arlington: Poems for Arlington, VA. Previous publications include the memoir Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone, the novel Not to Mention a Nice Life, and the non-fiction collections Murphy’s Law, Volumes One and Two.
