Daniel A. Harris will read poems about race and “color” from his recent book Accents on Sunday, March 11, at 3 p.m. at the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, Fellowship Hall (second floor; entry on Quarry Street, ADA-accessible). He will focus on his growing up white in a privileged Manhattan environment, from birth (1942) to the verge of college (1960) while only sporadically learning about white supremacy, racism, and the practice of enslaving blacks in the United States. 

Admission is free. However, the reading is a fundraiser: Harris will donate all proceeds from sales of his the book to the NAACP-Legal Defense Fund, and will urge the audience listeners to “buy” generously. Copies will be provided to all for the reading itself, so that they may read or listen. A question period will follow.

Harris’s third collection of poems, Accents follows Loose Parlance (2008) and Random Unisons (2012). A professor of English for 35 years, most recently at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, he has written literary criticism on Yeats, Tennyson, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Browning, Grace Aguilar, T. S. Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He founded Jewish Voices, an educational outreach program focusing on Jewish-American and Anglo-Jewish poetry.