Asim poem reflects on Ferguson turmoil
Jabari Asim, associate professor in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department, wrote a poem titled “The Talk” about the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, which was published in the Sunday, August 17 edition of the Washington Post.
Asim, who was raised near St. Louis, has been working on a book-length project in which he writes poems in response to specific events involving justice, crime, and punishment.
“By the time of Mike Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer, I had already begun scribbling lines and addressing the idea of ‘The Talk’ that many African American parents give to their sons when they reach adolescence,” Asim said. “I consider the poem in the tradition of Langston Hughes’s ‘Mother to Son,’ and Dudley Randall’s ‘Ballad of Birmingham.’”
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