HOPE: An Evening with Kwame Dawes and Christopher Lydon at Wellesley College

On Tuesday, Oct. 6, at 7:30 pm in Wellesley's Collins Cinema, "HOPE: An Evening with Kwame Dawes and Christopher Lydon," will feature a reading of poems about HIV and AIDS in Jamaica followed by a philosophical discussion about the human capacity to generate optimism in difficult times. Born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica, Dawes is the distinguished poet in residence at the University of South Carolina. Lydon is the host of "Open Source," the local/global, broadcast/Internet radio conversation based at Brown University's Watson Institute and former anchor of "The Connection" on public radio in Boston.

HOPE will feature poetry, still images and a recorded score that draws upon European classical and American folk traditions.

Dawes will read from his 14th collection of poetry, "Hope's Hospice," which was inspired by a journey to Jamaica to report on HIV and AIDS for the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Audio files of the poems are available on the Web site livehopelove.com, which was nominated for an Emmy in the new media category for New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming: Arts, Lifestyle & Culture.

"October will bring to Wellesley's Newhouse Center the extraordinary combined talents of two of the most captivating voices of the contemporary African and Caribbean diasporic literary tradition," said Carol Dougherty, the Center's new director. "Both events bring music, language and a flair for the dramatic together in the kind of innovative, hybrid performance formats that we hope to encourage at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities." The Newhouse Center for the Humanities was established by a generous gift from Susan and Donald Newhouse in 2004. The Center aims to enrich the intellectual life of the Wellesley College community and to promote excellence and innovation in humanistic studies.