Leonard Slade Jr October 31, 2006 (Tuesday) 8:00 p.m. Reading Assembly Hall, Campus Center UAlbany Uptown Campus

Leonard Slade, Jr is the author of twelve books of poetry. His most recent collection is Jazz After Dinner (2006), poems of celebration and endurance that express the human need to be connected to both the present and the past.

"Jazz After Dinner is a significant volume of poetry. Slade's poems reek of life, jazz, and the bebop rhythms of a Langston Hughes-celebration and endurance, yes, but with a little toe-dancing as well. What more do we ask of our poets? Slade is a bit of a British Romantic, but the American kind, one who also says, 'Yassir. Look at me and be healed.'" - poet Ginny MacKenzie

Slade is the author of eleven previous books of poetry, including For the Love of Freedom (2000), Elisabeth and Other Poems (1999), Lilacs in Spring (1998), Neglecting the Flowers (1997), Pure Light (1996), Fire Burning (1995), Vintage (1995), The Whipping Song (1993), I Fly Like a Bird (1992), The Beauty of Blackness (1989), and Another Black Voice: A Different Drummer (1988).

"I have read [Slade's] poems, and I am the better for it, the wiser for it, and the happier for it." - Maya Angelou

Slade is the author of a work of literary criticism, Symbolism in Herman Melville's Moby Dick: From the Satanic to the Divine (1998). He is also the editor of Black Essays (1995), a collection of outstanding short pieces by African American critics and scholars. He has published in Essence, U.S. News and World Report, Ebony, The American Poetry Review, The Journal of Southern History, The Black Scholar, and other publications.

Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at UAlbany, Slade is also the Director of the Doctor of Arts in Humanistic Studies Program, and Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program.

A past member of the National Research Center on the Teaching of Literature, he has been the recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award at Kentucky State University and the State University of New York, Albany, the Professor of the Year Award from the SUNY Albany NAACP Chapter, the Southern Conference on Afro-American Studies Award, the Kentucky Humanities Grant, the Hudson-Mohawk Association of Colleges and Universities Award, the Northeast Modern Language Association Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the U.S. Department of Fellowship for Postdoctoral Study, and the Ragdale Artists' Fellowship, Lake Forest, Illinois.