This week’s Black History Month post highlights Black creators in poetry and music, including pop, hip hop, rap, punk, and rock. This is only a small selection of our collection, so stop by and browse our digital collections from your own computer or stop in and browse our shelves.
Updated 2/15/2023: Want some poetry bookmarks? Go to the end of the post!
Interested in learning how to make your own music using only a laptop? Check out this awesome event through the Wake County Public Libraries featuring Durham’s Pierce Freelon. Registration is requested and is free.
Explore music production and entrepreneurship by learning how to compose, sample, and write a song using only a laptop with Grammy-nominated musician and co-creator of PBS’s Beat Making Lab.
Be sure to check out the other Black History Month events through the Wake County Public Library’s “Celebrating Black Brilliance” series.
Histories, essays, graphic nonfiction, and memoirs– the Durham Tech Library has many exciting books and audiobooks on Black musical history and musicians.
See last week’s post for the library hot tip about shelf and catalog browsing— hint: similar items are grouped together by call number, the link in the caption. (Spoiler: That’s the hot tip, but last week’s post has a picture.)
We also have awesome music documentaries in the Main Campus DVD collection. Browse it at the bottom of the staircase in the Main Campus Library near the instruction computer lab.
Here are just a few of the many exceptional books of poetry in the Durham Tech Library by contemporary Black poets–
And very small selection of our Black poetry collections–
To see poetry in action, PBS’s Poetry in America series highlights and discusses “unforgettable” American poems.
Check out the episodes on Gwendolyn Brooks’s “To Prisoners,” Langston Hughes’s “Harlem,” Nas’s “New York State of Mind,” and Evie Shockley’s “you can say that again, billie” streaming through the Films on Demand database (off-campus users log in with your Durham Tech username and password). For additional resources, go to PBS’s Poetry in America site.
Print your own set of poetry bookmarks for Black History Month from the Library’s annual poetry bookmark collection (for Poetry Month in April). This set features an excerpt from “In This Place (An American Lyric” by Amanda Gorman, “[Seven of the ten things I love in the face of James Baldwin]” by Terrance Hayes, “My Mother Enters the Workforce” by Rita Dove, “little prayer” by Danex Smith, and “for grandma” by NC Poet Laureate Jackie Shelton Green.
Document displays as a PDF. To print, select 2-sided, print on short edge options.