Ancestor of Longfellow celebrates
the local St. Martinville History

Dr. Layne Longfellow is the Poetry Ambassador of the Friends of the Longfellow National Historic Site, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He travels throughout North America and abroad reading the works of his distant relative in his own informative interpretations.

On Sunday, May 21st at 2:00 p.m., the St Martinville Cultural Heritage Center / Museums of the Acadian Memorial and African American will host Dr. Layne Longfellow, distant relative of the poet, reading selections from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's collection of antislavery poems published in 1842 and lecture on the poet's championing of the African slaves, Acadians and Native Americans. On Saturday, at the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site, he will lecture on the poet and readings from his poems. Longfellow will celebrate the history of the region known historically as the meeting place of the french Creole planters and the Acadians of Nova Scotia seeking refuge after the British expulsion.

Though his works, "Evangeline", "Song of Hiawatha," and "Collections of Antislavery Poems" are different, they are all manifestations of the profound social conscience of this greatest American poet of the 19th century. Longfellow campaigned vigorously for the recognition of the rights of all races and ethnic groups. In "Hiawatha," for example, he put forth an eloquent plea for the recognition of the humanness of people then widely called "savages."

Dr. Longfellow asks: "What stronger statement of integrity and principle can there be -- one's heart and feelings prompt one to take action, and one's moral judgment approves the action. Such was the quality of this man, who has been called both 'Poet of the People' and 'The Man Who Invented America.

www.longfellowpoetry.com