News & Events
City Tech’s 2008 Literary Arts Festival to Feature Presentation by Author, Songwriter and National Poetry Slam Champion Regie O’Hare Gibson
The 2008 Literary Arts Festival at New York City College of Technology in Downtown Brooklyn will feature a presentation on creative writing by internationally acclaimed author, songwriter, workshop facilitator and educator Regie O’Hare Gibson. The event also will include readings in poetry, fiction, drama, humor and essay writing by student winners of the Regina Lebowitz Humor Contest, the E.B. White Prize for Best Essay on New York City, the City Tech Scholars Award (with winners selected from best students works from the 2008 edition of City Tech Writer, the College’s journal of outstanding student writing from all disciplines) and other competitions. Admission is free and the public is invited.
Regie O’Hare Gibson
Regie O’Hare Gibson has read, taught, lectured and performed at universities, theaters and other venues worldwide, most recently in Havana, Cuba. He has worked or performed with artists as diverse as composer, conductor and instrumentalist David Amram and rapper/actor Mos Def, folksinger and guitarist Richie Havens and the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who described Gibson as “a talent rare, charismatic and humane, [whose performances are] supersonic and in the stratosphere…you sing and chant for all of us [and] nobody gets left out.”
Gibson has performed with the Elgin Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra “X,” a multiethnic, multicultural ensemble of classically trained musicians from several countries. He and his work appear in the New Line Cinema production, Love Jones, a film based on events in his life. His work also has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Iowa Review and Poetry Magazine. He is a National Slam Poetry Individual Champion, has been featured numerous times on National Public Radio and HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.” Gibson was nominated for a Boston Emmy Award for his featured performance on WBGH’s “Art Close-up.”
His first collection of poems, Storms Beneath the Skin, received the Golden Pen Award. Gibson is recipient of a Walker Fellowship at The Providence Fine Arts Work Center and has received his MFA in poetry from New England College. He is currently featured in the “Big Ten Welcome to the Big Stage” television ads and performs with Synesthesis, a literary-music ensemble he created that fuses literature with American funk, jazz and blues, European classical elements, Middle Eastern percussion and smatterings of electronica.
The festival will be held on Thursday, May 8, 2008, from 5 to 7:30 p.m., in New York City College of Technology’s Atrium Amphitheater, 300 Jay Street (at Tillary) in Downtown Brooklyn. For additional information, contact Professor Monique Ferrell at mferrell@citytech.cuny.edu.
04/01/08
