Tyehimba Jess is winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book “Olio.” With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, his much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. “Olio” is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.