PRAISE SONGS FOR DAVE THE POTTER

Poetry reading and discussion with Dr. Gabrielle Foreman, MacArthur Fellow, and Glenis Redmond, Poet Laureate of Greenville about David Drake, the enslaved South Carolina potter and poet. 

Gabrielle Foreman and Glenis Redmond will discuss their collaboration on the book, Praise Songs for Dave the Potter, Art and Poetry for David Drake (University of Georgia Press, 2023).

David Drake is recognized as one of the United States’ most accomplished nineteenth-century potters. Yet, though his pots—many inscribed with original verse—sit in museums across the nation, he is too often passed over as one of the early progenitors of the African American poetic tradition. Born in South Carolina at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Drake produced hundreds of pieces while under the surveillance of the enslavers who claimed him and his work as their property. As Gabrielle Foreman notes, he is perhaps the only Black person in all of the free or slave states whose literary work was preserved in neither books nor pamphlets nor newspapers. His pots and jars served as pages as well as ceramic vessels.