Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, widely known for penning the famous words, “I know why the caged bird sings!” in his poem, Sympathy. Born in 1872, Dunbar was one of the first African American writers to be internationally recognized in the wake of emancipation. But while his extraordinary talent was celebrated, a deeper examination of his life reveals much about Black fame, and the cultural response to it, near the turn of the century. In a meticulously researched biography, author and scholar Gene Andrew Jarrett describes the person behind the fame, offering a revelatory account of a writer whose celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who felt like a “caged bird” that sings. While audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race as an artist. He came to regard his fame as a curse as well as a blessing. Jarrett’s work illustrates the tension that Dunbar held throughout his brief, a