The City of Smyrna will observe Black History Month with a Celebration Dinner with Dr. Daniel Black, author of the novel Don’t Cry for Me, on Friday, February 23, at 5:30 p.m. at the Smyrna Community Center, 1250 Powder Springs Street.
According to the press release for the event:
Dr. Daniel Black is an award-winning novelist, professor, activist, mentor and public speaker. His published works include They Tell Me of Home, The Sacred Place, Perfect Peace, Twelve Gates to the City, The Coming, Listen to the Lambs, Don’t Cry for Me, and Black on Black. Dr. Black has been nominated for the Townsend Literary Prize, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, the Ferro-Grumbley Literary Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Prize, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
His novel, The Coming, was published to broad critical acclaim in 2015 and is a first-hand account of the trauma and triumph of Africans aboard a slave ship in the 16th century. In 2016, Dr. Black’s long-awaited novel Listen to the Lambs was released. It explores the lives and agency of unhoused people who find each other on the street and create lives of meaning without material substance.
National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward describes Dr. Black’s newest 2022 novel, Don’t Cry for Me, as “an epistolary dirge of a man singing to his son as he faces death by cancer. At turns intense and funny, tender and brutally honest, Jacob’s letter to his son, Isaac, is revelatory.” Black’s newest work is his first essay collection titled BLACK ON BLACK, released in 2023.
According to Dr. Black’s biography on the Encyclopedia of Arkansas website, he is a nationally renowned, award-winning novelist inspired by African-American life, history, and heritage in the South, covering themes of race, religion, and sexuality.
Born on November 28, 1965, in Kansas City, Kansas, and raised in Arkansas, he graduated from Morrilton High School.
After…
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