First-year reading programs are increasingly common on college campuses across the United States. Students are assigned a book to read over the summer and then discuss it with their peers and teachers when they arrive on campus for the start of their first year in college. Common reading programs contribute to student success because they emphasize reading as an intellectual skill central to student achievement in college and promote learning with and from others.
All freshman students enrolled in W131, English Composition I, at IU Kokomo will be reading books by author, Kevin Powell. Book choices include, Someday We’ll All Be Free and No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn.
Kevin Powell is widely considered one of America’s most important voices in these early years of the 21st century. Legendary feminist Gloria Steinem proclaims that "as a charismatic speaker, leader, and a very good writer, Kevin Powell has the courage...to be fully human, and this will bring the deepest revolution of all."
Powell is a political activist, poet, journalist, essayist, hip-hop historian, public speaker, and entrepreneur. A product of extreme poverty, welfare, fatherlessness, and a single mother-led household, he is a native of Jersey City, New Jersey and was educated at New Jersey’s Rutgers University.
Powell is a longtime resident of Brooklyn, New York, and it is from his base in New York City that he has published seven books, including his current title, Someday We’ll All Be Free (Soft Skull Press). This book is a collection of provocative essays on freedom, democracy, justice, and race in America, as inspired by Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 presidential election, and September 11th.
Powell is presently at work on a new collection of essays, Letters to A Young American (2008), and his second volume of poetry, No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn (2008). Additionally, Powell is at work on his childhood memoir, Homeboy Alone, slated for 2010, and The Kevin Powell Anthology (2011), which will highlight the first twenty-five years of his literary career.
Powell has also written numerous essays, articles, and reviews through the years for publications such as Esquire, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Essence, Rolling Stone, Ebony, The Amsterdam News, and Vibe, where he was a founding staff member and served as a senior writer, interviewing and profiling, among many others, Colin Powell, and the late Tupac Shakur. At present Powell is a Writing Fellow for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Phelps Stokes Fund Senior Fellow, and a 2008 candidate for the United States Congress in Brooklyn, New York.
Kevin Powell will visit IU Kokomo in September to discuss the book with all freshman students.
Photo and biography provided by the American Program Bureau.
