Hall Center to host conversation on Langston Hughes, democracy featuring former KU professors

LAWRENCE — The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas will host its final Humanities Speaker Series event of the spring 2026 semester, featuring acclaimed author and former KU professor Randal Jelks in conversation with Maryemma Graham, distinguished professor emerita in the Department of English at KU. 

The talk will take place at 7 p.m. April 23 at the Hall Center, 900 Sunnyside Ave., and will be available to watch online.

Presenting his most recent work, "My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy," Jelks traces Hughes' journey from his childhood in Lawrence and Kansas City to a global perspective in Paris, New York, Mexico City and Madrid, examining how Hughes' encounters with a world on the brink of upheaval shaped his thinking on art, democracy and activism. Best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes believed in the power of art as resistance and wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective.

Jelks is an award-winning author, documentary film producer and current Ruth N. Halls Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other journals and periodicals.

Graham, founder of the Project on the History of Black Writing in 1983, has decades of experience in literary recovery and African American studies, preserving the work of Black writers whose stories had been lost or underappreciated.

This event is free and open to the public. To attend online, visit the CrowdCast webpage.

Founded in 1947, the Humanities Speaker Series is the oldest continuing program of its kind at KU. Previous speakers have included actor and author Alan Alda, author and vlogger John Green, poet A.E. Stallings, sociologist Matthew Desmond and many others.