Walt Whitman Birthplace Association is pleased to present the second season of Walking with Whitman: Poetry in Performance, a series of performances and presentations by some of the most intriguing figures in contemporary literature and the arts on the national scene, paired with respected voices on the regional scene. The series is hosted by Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer in Residence George Wallace.

Purchase tickets for full Walking with Whitman 2012 season here.

Tickets for individual events are available at the door.  Receptions for all events begin 45 minutes before the reading.

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Sunday, March 4 (1-3 PM)

Quincy Troupe with Daniela Gioseffi and Brendan Constantine

Event Tickets: $15/ Reception at 12:15 PM

Quincy Troupe is an awarding-winning author of eight volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works. In 2010 he recei ved the American Book Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement.Among his best-selling works are Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis and his memoir, Miles & Me. Other works are: The Pursuit of Happyness, an autobiography he wrote with Chris Gardner that became a major motion picture and that was a New York Times bestseller for over 40 weeks; The Architecture of Language, a book of poems, that won the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achiev ement.

Quincy Troupe is professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, and editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a literary journal of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University.

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Daniela Gioseffi is An American Book Award winning author of fourteen books of poetry and prose. Her latest is Wild Nights, Wild Nights: The Story of Emily Dickinson’s Master, (©2010) and Blood Autumn, New and Selected Poems (© 2007). She has interviewed such notables as Galway Kinnell, Robert Pinsky, Grace Paley, Bob Holman, Meena Alexander, and Ishmael Reed to name a few. Daniela is winner of the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry as well as two NY State Council for the Arts grant awards in poetry. She has presented her writing widely throughout the USA and Europe and for National Public Radio and the BBC, Oxford and London. She’s been a featured reader at various international book fairs from Miami to Barcelona. Her poetry, essays, and interviews have been published in Rain Taxi Review, Poet Lore, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times, MS., Chelsea Literary Review, Poetry East and many other periodicals. Daniela edits www.PoetsUSA.com/ and her verse was etched in marble on a wall of Penn Stations Seventh Ave. Concourse near that of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Gioseffi’s work appears in numerous anthologies from Anchor/ Doubleday, Viking Press, Touchstone Simon and Schuster, Harper Collins, etc. Her compendium of world literature, Women on War: International Writings from Antiquity to the Present is a women’s studies classic in print for over twenty-five years. Her edited collection with a fifty page introduction on the psychological dynamics of xenophobia of all kinds, titled On Prejudice: A Global Perspective, was presented at the United Nations and won a World Peace Award from The Ploughshares Fund. It has been used for tolerance teaching on campuses throughout the USA and Europe, from Princeton to MIT. Recently, she presented a seminar for Poets House in New York City titled: Transcendentalism in American Poetry from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to the Present.

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Brendan Constantine was born in 1967, the second child of two working actors, and named after Irish playwright Brendan Behan.

An ardent supporter of Southern California’s poetry communities and one of its most recognized poets, he was nominated for Poet Laureate of the state before publishing a full-length manuscript.

His first collection, Letters To Guns, was released in February 2009 from Red Hen Press and continues to receive acclaim. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, FIELD, Ninth Letter, The Pinch, ArtLife and LA Times Bestseller The Underground Guide to Los Angeles. His most recent collections are Calamity Joe (2012 Red Hen Press) and Birthday Girl With Possum (2011 Write Bloody Press).

Mr. Constantine is poet-in-residence at the Windward School in West Los Angeles. He is also currently working with The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, bringing poetry workshops to Alzheimer's patients throughout the southland. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Hollywood at Bela Lugosi’s last address.