Join us on Sunday, February 12 at 4pm when HHM’s Poet-in-Residence Danny Shot gathers 4 poets in a celebration of the life and art of, “Richard Bruce Nugent: Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance (and Hoboken).” Admission is free and refreshments will be served. This event can also be viewed LIVE online at “Hoboken Museum.” “Chat” on YouTube, “Comment” on Facebook. 

Richard Bruce Nugent, born in Washington, DC in 1906, was a Harlem Renaissance writer, illustrator, and actor, a friend of writer Zora Neale Hurston, and a co-founder with poet Langston Hughes of the influential—and to more staid community members, shocking—1926 Black literary magazine Fire!!, which included pioneering explorations of homosexuality, bisexuality, color prejudice, and interracial relationships. Nugent’s contribution, the short story “Smoke Lilies and Jade,” features a protagonist who, like its author, proudly declared his gay identity. In a foreword for a 2002 collection of Nugent’s work, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes Nugent as “one of the key figures in both the creative world of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex underground world of gay culture.” In his later years, this proud Black gay artist was sought out and praised, his accomplishments recognized. Scholars and filmmakers came to see him in the city where he spent his last eight years: Hoboken.

Danny Shot hosts the event. Four accomplished and award-winning poets will read their own work, as well as selections from Nugent’s work.

reg e gaines is a published poet, Tony Award winning playwright, Grammy Award nominated lyricist and Artistic Director of the Downtown Urban Arts Festival since 2007.

Cyd Charisse Fulton is editorial assistant for Black Renaissance Noire journal and founder of Emphat!c Press. A 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, her work is featured in several publications, literary journals and she has two chapbooks; Feeding Off of the North Star and Emphatic Radical. In 2018, her poetry manuscript Equitable Rage was read at “Fierce” co-sponsored by the National Park Service and aaduna.org and convened at the National Women’s Rights Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY.

Robert Anthony Gibbons has been nominated for a Pushcart for his poem, “a self taught genius” by Great Weather for Media. Robert has been published in hundreds of literary magazines and in several notable anthologies. Robert’s first collection, Close to the Tree was published by Three Rooms Press, 2012, and his chapbook, Flight was published by Hoboken’s own Poets Wear Prada in 2019.  – “Bruce Nugent is one of my literary ancestors. I have followed his work from Washington, DC. to the Harlem Renaissance. He knew Langston Hughes and Alain Locke. Now, he lives again in Hoboken.”

Ama Birch is the author of “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” “Faces in the Clouds,” “Sonnet Boom!,” “Ferguson Interview Project,” and a video game available for Android, “Space Quake by Ama Birch.” She has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. She has been published by Blue Light Press, Great Weather for Media, Autonomedia, A Gathering of the Tribes, Vail/Vale, Vitrine, Insert Blanc Press, Live Mag!, Fellswoop, Apricity, Grove Atlantic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Belladonna*.