Philip C. Kolin is the University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi where he edits the Southern Quarterly. Kolin has published six collections of poems, Reading God’s Handwriting: Poems (2012) and In the Custody of Words: Poems (2013) being the most recent. He has also published more than thirty-five scholarly books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, African American women playwrights, Edward Albee, and David Rabe.
This poem compares the martyrdom of Emmett Till to St. Moses the Ethiopian, the patron saint of Africa; both saints share the same feast day.
