Silo City, Buffalo (outdoors, the Willow Trellis). An event at the UB Humanities Institute’s Utopia Festival. With Brandon Williamson, Brian Brown, and Sam Magavern. All Utopia Festival events are free, but you must pre-register at https://buffalohumanities.org/. You can come for as much or as little of the weekend as you like.

In the late 1850s, Walt Whitman composed “Calamus:” a daring, sometimes utopian sequence of poems about camaraderie, friendship, and love among men, and how that love could save American democracy. In this event, Brandon Williamson and Brian Brown of Ujima Theatre will perform poems from Calamus. Sam Magavern, senior policy fellow at Partnership for the Public Good, will offer an introduction to the Calamus poems and lead a discussion with the actors about them. This event will provide a sneak preview of the Calamus Project, which will feature films of all 45 Calamus poems, a website, and a “Calamus Day” in Buffalo in June 2022.