Embracing Our Rootswith Dr. John S. Wright & Davu Underwood Seru

Embracing Our Roots consists of conversations where young arts leaders join our elders in conversation about significant milestones in Minnesota’s history. The series is a collaboration between More Than a Single Story, , and to highlight conversations between Black artists across generations.

*This is an in-person event* please register

Panelist Bios

John S. Wright- Morse-Amoco Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus of African American & African Studies and English at the University of Minnesota. Born in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, Wright earned degrees in three different fields from the University: his Ph.D. (American Studies / History of African Peoples, 1977), M.A., (English & American Literature, 1971), and B.E.E. (Electrical Engineering, 1968). Before leaving in 1973 to build a program in Afro-American & African Studies at Carleton College, he participated in the student movement that helped found both the University’s Department of African American & African Studies and its Martin Luther King Program, which he subsequently administered for three years. After returning to the University in 1984, he chaired the AFRO Department, spearheaded the acquisition of the Archie Givens Collection of African American Literature & Life, and served on the CLA faculty for thirty-five years before retiring in 2019.

While serving as senior editor of Coffeehouse Press’s Black Arts Movement Reprint Series and Simon & Schuster’s Givens Collection Series, he published the critically acclaimed intellectual biography, Shadowing Ralph Ellison: Art, Freedom, and Technologies of the Spirit; and he has consulted for such television documentaries as Africans in America; Midnight Ramble: the Cinema of Oscar Micheaux; and PBS’s Free to Dance series. His extended essay on African American Intellectual Life for the Macmillan Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History remains a scholarly landmark. As performer, he headlined revivals of Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center on a double-bill with Imamu Amiri Baraka, and on stage with John Faddis and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band in its 2000 production.

Davu Underwood Seru is the Curator of the Givens Collection of African American Literature and Life and co-author of the book Sights, Sounds, Soul: The Twin Cities Through The Lens of Charles Chamblis, which was a finalist for the 2017 MN Book Award. He has published articles on literature, music, history and culture in American Book Review, The Waker Art Center online magazine MnArtist.org and the French jazz magazine Les Allumés du Jazz. He is currently working on a book project with the artist Seitu Ken Jones.

In 2023, before leaving the English Department at Hamline University, where he had taught since 2011, Davu was awarded the Dr. Colleen S. Bell Outstanding Faculty Award. He continues to teach on- and off-campus.

Davu is also an improvising musician and composer known primarily for his work on drums. His compositions often emphasize interdisciplinarity and draw from archival research. This work has afforded him an international reputation and awards from McKnight Foundation (2020 Composer Fellowship), Jerome Foundation (2017-18 Composer/Sound Artist Fellow) and commissions from Walker Art Center and Zeitgeist ensemble.

Davu remains the longest-serving teaching assistant to Dr. John S. Wright and the longest-serving graduate research fellow to the Givens Collection.

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