comments for the Ethelbert-70 project

 

E-70 Project /jww

 

I was introduced to E. Ethelbert Miller by Ahmos Zu-Bolton in 1974, and that was the beginning of an interesting friendship.  While I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia (1974-77), I had many opportunities to visit friends in Washington, DC and to have conversations with Ethelbert.  Many a Sunday we conversed over pancakes.  We recorded some radio book reviews with Dr Eleanor Traylor and collaborated with Zu-Bolton on magazine editing projects. As director of Howard University's African American Studies Resource Center, he was an energetic collector of contemporary materials on Diasporic literature and culture,  and he worked with Stephen E. Henderson in organizing black writers' conferences at Howard.  If anyone makes a rigorous study of those conferences, that researcher will discover how instrumental Ethelbert was in promoting critical thinking about literature, politics, and culture.

 

Serving as a program officer at NEH in 1985 enabled me to have frequent exchanges with Ethelbert  about literature and world affairs.  He had by then established the Ascension Poetry Reading series, and I recall vividly the reading that involved 100 poets.  That night,  Ethelbert greeted me with the sad news that my friend Lance Jeffers, with whom I had spoken a few days earlier had died.  I was devastated and was barely able to read my signature poem "Jazz to Jackson to John" as a tribute to Jeffers.  On  one program in the series, Alvin Aubert and I read together.

 

From the 1990s to the present, Ethelbert and I have had less frequent contact.  But the circle of friendship  remains unbroken.  I published five of his poems in Trouble the Water: 250 Years of

African-American Poetry (1997) and wrote a rave review of his memoir Fathering Words for African American Review.

 

Ethelbert's legacy consists of his poetry and prose and the work he has done nationally and internationally to promote deeper, more honest thinking about human beings and art.  He is a writer activist, a "cultural worker" in the sense that Toni Cade Bambara used that phrase.

 

For forty-six years, E. Ethelbert  Miller has been a person I think about when I ask myself this question: What must we write?  When I think about how crucial it is to use one's own moral compass, I think of Ethelbert.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            Tuesday, October 13, 2020

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