Registration opens:
January 20th, 2025

Black History Month Celebration with the Toms River NAACP

Dreamweaver: The Works of Langston Hughes

Celebrate Black History Month with a soul food tasting, a performance by the TRHS North N'Step Team, and a dramatic rendition of Langston Hughes' poems and short stories by David Mills.

Join us for the annual Toms River Area NAACP's Black History Month Celebration. The afternoon's events include a delicious soul food tasting, courtesy of NAACP members, and a rousing performance by the Toms River High School North N'Step Team. There will also be giveaways and other surprises to enjoy.

The main event will be a performance of Dreamweaver: The Works of Langston Hughes, by actor David Mills. Mills’ performance takes the audience on an odyssey spanning five decades of Langston’s writings, where Mr. Mills portrays Hughes’ iconic characters from his poems and short stories. Mr. Mills’ performance highlights Hughes’ unending love for Harlem --with its foibles and fantasies and beauty and brutality. Mr. Mills plays black and white, young and old, and male and female characters Hughes created. This performance is sponsored by the Friends of the Ocean County Library - Toms River.

The afternoon's events begin at noon and end about 3:30pm. Mr. Mills' performance will begin about 2pm. Please register.

Actor and writer David Mills has been performing the works of Langston Hughes for two decades. He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home for three years (and was a recipient of the Langston Hughes Society Award). Mills holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University. He’s published four poetry collections: The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, After Mistic (Massachusetts slavery poems) and Boneyarn—the sole book of poems about slavery in New York and winner of the North American Book Award. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Rattapallax, Poetry Daily, Evergreen Review, and Fence—and he has been a Pushcart Prize finalist. He has also received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, The American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Henry James and Holden Fellowships, the Schomburg Center, the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize. He wrote the audio script for Macarthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition "Reflections in Black:100 Years of Black Photography," which showed at the Whitney and Getty Museums. He is the poet-in-residence for the Bronx Historical Society. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills about Dr. King. And as an actor, Mr. Mills also performs a one-person show of the works of Dr. King. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records and has had his works displayed at the Venice Biennale. He has appeared on New York NPR affiliate WNYC.

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