Poetry celebration is March 30

DANIELSON — Quinebaug Valley Community College will hold its 9th Annual Julius Sokenu Poetry Prize Celebration at 6 p.m. March 30 at the Capitol Theater at 896 Main St. in Willimantic. The event will feature a reading by Nancy Morejón, award-winning student poets, and open- mic participants. This year, the celebration is part of the series Conversations at QV: Identity and Race. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments. The internationally acclaimed poet Nancy Morejón, one of the most highly regarded and widely translated Cuban poets living today, will be the evening’s honored guest and featured reader. In her intimate, but historically significant poems, Morejón explores the rich and complex Afro-Cuban identity. A boundary- breaking writer and thinker, she was the first woman to earn a faculty in arts degree from the University of Havana, and was one of the first Cuban women to celebrate blackness and confront racism directly in her work. The Julius Sokenu Poetry Awards is a lively annual event honoring the best student poetry in English and Spanish at Quinebaug Valley Community College and at the Quinebaug Middle College. The event is sponsored by the QVCC Foundation, Department of English, Department of Spanish, Department of History and Social Sciences, the Cultural Programming Committee, QVCC Library, EASTCONN’s Quinebaug Middle College, and the QVCC Student Government Association, as well as generous Julius Sokenu Poetry Prize donors.