Robert Hayden — Those Winter Sundays

What sacrifices were made by your parents when you were a child? How did you think about them as they were happening? And how do you think about them now? In his poem “Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden holds space for a weighted childhood memory and the regret, love, and pain it evokes.

Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was the first Black American poet to be appointed the Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate); he held this role from 1976 to 1978. Hayden was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Hopwood Award, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, and Russell Loines Award for distinguished poetic achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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