TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Tony Bolden, assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama will speak and sign copies of his new book, “Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture,” Wednesday, Feb. 25, at 4:30 p.m. in the Hoole Special Collections Library on the UA campus.

The book signing is part of the UA African-American Heritage Month event. An exhibition of African-American literature and music-related materials from the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library will also be on display in conjunction with the event.

The event will begin at 4:30 p.m. with the signing and a reception, and will be followed by at 30-minute reading by Bolden at 5:30 p.m. Bolden will continue to sign books and answer questions, and the reception will continue until 6:30 pm.

In “Afro-Blue,” Bolden traces the ways innovations in Black music and poetry have driven the evolution of a variety of other American vernacular artistic forms. The blues tradition, Bolden demonstrates, plays a key role in the relationship between poetry and vernacular expressive forms.

Through an analysis of the formal qualities of blues music, “Afro-Blue” shows that it functions as a form of resistance, affirming the values and style of life that oppose bourgeois morality. Bolden examines how poets extend and reshape a variety of other verbal folk forms in the same way that blues musicians play with other musical genres.

Bolden identifies three distinct bodies of blues poetics: some poets mimic and riff on oral forms, others fuse their dedication to vernacular culture with a concern for literary conventions, while still others opt to embody the blues poetics by becoming blues performers.

For more information about this event, please contact Jessica Lacher-Feldman, Public Outreach Services Coordinator of the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at 205/348-0500 or archives@bama.ua.edu, or visit the website at www.lib.ua.edu/libraries/hoole.