Award-winning writer and slam poet Tyehimba Jess headlines the ninth annual Blackbird Poetry Festival for HoCoPoLitSo. With rare skill, Jess welds the immediacy of slam poetry with the craft of poetry on the page. Mr. Jess will read from and discuss his recent work, Olio, as well as leadbelly, his 2004 book chosen for the National Poetry Series, during the Nightbird Poetry Reading. About Olio, 2011 National Book award winner Nikky Finney said: “Tyehimba Jess is inventive, prophetic, wondrous. He writes unflinchingly into the historical clefs of blackface, black sound, human sensibility.”