ABOUT THE WEEKSVILLE PROJECT

The "Weeksville Project" is a novel,  "Weeksville, Near the Hunterfly Road" (2012), and a series of poems that depict life in the 1830-90 community of Weeksville.  in Brooklyn, New York.

I discovered knowledge about Weeksville, it's culture and history, in 1984 as an undergraduate at the College of New Rochelle, DC 37 Campus.  Ms Joan Maynard, Director of the Society for the Preservation Weeksville was a guest speaker in one of my classes.

The story of Weeksville has always intrigued the hell out of me.

This project attempts to recreate the experiences of these Black people from all walks of life through poetry.  It will be in the vein of  Gwendolyn Brook’s, "A Street in Bronzeville," and Marilyn Nelson's "My Seneca Village."  It specifically draws influence from these two books, but is inspired by the experiences  of countless other poets  who were moved in the same way.

For this project I will deal with Weeksville from it's earliest beginnings until the turn of the 19th century.