In his final days\, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a "multiracial coalition of the working poor." King h oped this coalition would become the next civil rights movement but he was assassinated before he could see it emerge as the Poor People's Campaign\ , now led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. Kin g's last lesson&mdash\;about the dangers of dividing working people&mdash\ ;inspired the conversation gathered here by Jones and Howell.
\nFift y-five years after the assassination of King\, \;What Things Cost \;collects stories that are honest\, provocative\, and galvanizing\, shari ng the hidden costs of labor and laboring in the United States of America. Voices such as Sonia Sanchez\, Faisal Mohyuddin\, Natalie Diaz\, Ocean Vu ong\, Silas House\, Sonia Guiñ\;ansaca\, Reginald Dwayne Betts\, Vic toria Chang\, Crystal Wilkinson\, Gerald Stern\, and Jericho Brown weave t ogether the living stories of the campaign's broad swath of supporters\, c reating a literary tapestry that depicts the struggle and solidarity behin d the work of building a more just America.
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Join the Prince Geor ge&rsquo\;s County Memorial Library System and the Prince George&rsquo\;s County Office of Human Rights as they welcome editors\, Rebecca Gayle Howe ll and Ashley M. Jones\, and authors\, Faisal Mohyuddin and Allison Pitini i Davis\, in conversation about this award-winning\, breath-taking antholo gy\, about economic (in)justice\, and the glorious\, necessary\, incalcula ble contributions of workers across America.
\nRebecca Gayle Howell& nbsp\;is a writer\, translator\, and editor. Her \;Best Book of the Ye ar honors include those from The Best Translated Book Awards\, Foreword&nb sp\;INDIES Awards\, The Nautilus Awards\, The Sexton Prize (U.K.)\, and Ba nipal Prize (U.K.). Among her other honors are the United States Artists F ellowship\, the Carson McCullers Fellowship\, the Pushcart Prize\, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Howell is the long-time poetry editor of \;The \;Oxford American \;a nd a professor of Poetry &\; Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program.
\nAshley M. Jones \;is the Poet Laureate of Alabam a (2022-2026). She is the first person of color and the youngest person to hold this position in its 93 year existence. She holds an MFA in Poetry f rom Florida International University\, and she is the author of \;Magi c City Gospel\, \; \;dark / / thing\, and \;REPARATIONS NOW!.& nbsp\;She is the co-editor of "WHAT THINGS COST: An Anthology for the Peop le." Her poetry has earned several awards\, including the Rona Jaffe Found ation Writers Award\, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards\, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry\, a Literature Fellows hip from the Alabama State Council on the Arts\, the \;Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize\, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. \;She was a fina list for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020\, and her collection\, "REPARATIONS NOW!" was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN/V oelcker Award for Poetry. Jones has been featured on news outlets includin g Good Morning America\, ABC News\, and the BBC. Her poems and essays appe ar in or are forthcoming at CNN\, POETRY\, The Oxford American\, Origins J ournal\, The Quarry by Split This Rock\, Obsidian\, and many others. She c o-directs \;PEN Birmingham\, and she is the founding director of the&n bsp\;Magic City Poetry Festival. She is the Associate Director of the Univ ersity Honors Program at UAB\, and she is part of the Core Faculty of the& nbsp\;Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served a s a guest editor for \;Poetry Magazine. In 2022\, she received a \ ;Poet Laureate Fellowship \;from the Academy of American Poets.
\n< p>Faisal Mohyuddin is a writer\, artist\, and educator. The child of immig rants from Pakistan\, he is the author of "The Displaced Children of Displ aced Children\," (Eyewear\, 2018)\, which won the 2017 Sexton Prize in Poe try\, and was selected as a 2018 Summer Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society and named a "highly commended" collection of the year by the Forwa rd Arts Foundation\; it went on to receive an Honorable Mention in the Ass ociation of Asian American Studies 2020 Book Award for Poetry. Faisal is a lso the author of the \;chapbook \;The Riddle of Longing \;(Ba ckbone Press\, 2017)\, and his work has received \;Prairie Schooner's Edward Stanley Award\, a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize from the Illinois S tate Library\, and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. His recent wor k appears in \;Poetry Magazine\, \;Poet Lore\, \;Kweli\, \ ;The Margins\, \;Pleiades\, \;Chicago Quarterly Review\, and \ ;RHINO. \;An alumnus of the U.S. Department of State's Fulbright Teach ers for Global Classrooms program\, Faisal is a graduate of Carleton Colle ge\, Northwestern University\, and Columbia College Chicago. An educator a dviser and master practitioner for the global-not-for-profit Narrative 4\, he teaches English at Highland Park High School in Illinois and creative writing at the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University. He lives in Oak Park\, Illinois. \;\nAllison Pitinii Davis is t he author of "Line Study of a Motel Clerk" (Baobab Press\, 2017)\, a final ist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Ohioana Book Award. The col lection focuses on a trucking motel\, a laundry\, and diasporic culture in the Rust Belt. Her work has been supported by Stanford University's Walla ce Stegner program\, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown\, and the S everinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute\, and she reg ularly publishes in venues like \;Best American Poetry\, \;The Aca demy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series\, \;The New Republic\, and&nb sp\;The Oxford American.
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