Tyehimba Jess won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Olio, which incorporates poems, songs, historical facts, interviews, and fiction to celebrate the lives and works of African American musicians, artists and orators who predated the Harlem Renaissance. Among those recognized: Missourian John William “Blind” Boone, a disabled, biracial concert pianist known as the pioneer of ragtime music.

Jess, a professor of English at the College of Staten Island, discusses and reads from his works in an event celebrating Kansas City’s designation as a Creative City of Music by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Co-presented by the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Center for Neighborhoods in the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning + Design, and co-sponsored by the Xi Tau Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., of Kansas City.