Listen to African American performance poet Robert Anthony Gibbons — a native Floridian who moved to New York City in 2007 — share how he sadly lost loved-ones in Florida to Covid-19. Robert and I met at City College of New York in the MFA program for creative writing. He is a published poet whose poems are transformative. He participates in the Zip Code Memory Project, which highlights social inequalities affecting communities of people of color and invites people to share their experience during the ongoing pandemic.
Robert talks about his bachelor of arts degree in history where he studied anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston whose work inspired me to continue her oral history tradition of recording the voices of Black Americans.
Here’s a link to the Zip Code Memory Project that both Robert and I participate in: https://zcmp.org You can scroll down to read about him.
You can read the essay that Robert references that Zora Neale Hurston wrote titled, “What White Publishers Won’t Print” in the Negro Digest, April 1950:
https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bgoldfarb/cogn150s12/reading/Hurston-What-White-Publishers-Wont-Print.pdf
Robert’s first book, “Close to the Tree,” was published by the New York-based Three Rooms Press.
You can purchase Robert’s book, “Flight,” here:
https://www.amazon.com/Flight-Robert-Anthony-Gibbons/dp/1946116076/
You can find Robert on social media:
Twitter: @robertgibbons54
