(last updated, May 23, 2009)

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Amiri, Baraka

Photo Credit:Lynda Koolish on amiribaraka.com

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.

Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003).

Works

• Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
• Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
• Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964
• The System of Dante’s Hell, novel, 1965
• Home: Social Essays, 1965
• Tales, 1967
• Black Magic, poems, 1969
• Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
• Slave Ship, 1970
• It’s Nation Time, poems, 1970
• Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
• Hard Facts, poems, 1975
• The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
• Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
• reggae or not!, 1981
• Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
• The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
• The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
• Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
• Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
• Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
• Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
• The Book of Monk, 2005
• Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
• Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
• Ancient Music

Angelou, Maya

Credit: mayaangelou.com

Maya Angelou (original name Marguerite Johnson) was born April 4, 1928 in St Louis, Missouri. Maya Angelou is one of America’s leading female contemporary Poets. However, Maya Angelou has also achieved much in the fields of theatre, acting, writing novels and also as a member of the Civil Rights movement.

Maya Angelou had a turbulent childhood but she was able to retell her experiences with great poignancy and effect in her book “I know Why The Caged Bird Sings” (1969) This book is a collection of stories from her childhood and this book made her one of the first African – American Women to reach the best sellers list. “ I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” was also nominated for the National Book Award.

AWARDS

1966; writer in residence at University of Kansas,

1970; distinguished visiting professor at Wake Forest University,

1974, Wichita State University, 1974, and California State University, Sacramento,

1974; professor at Wake Forest University, – a position she currently holds

1981. Northern coordinator of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1959-60; appointed member of American Revolution Bicentennial Council by President Gerald R. Ford,

1975-76; member of National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year.

1992 Woman of the Year, Essence Magazine,

1994 Grammy (for recording of “On the Pulse of the Morning”),

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Baldwin, James

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987) was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist.

Most of Baldwin’s work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.

James Baldwin Taking a Look at History NPR Radio 1986 Broadcast; All Things Considered

More resources:

James Baldwin on American Masters

Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones)

Brooks, Gwendolyn

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (7 June 1917 – 3 December 2000) was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.^[1]

Gwendolyn Brooks

<!—–>Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (1987); To Disembark (1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986); Riot (1969); In the Mecca (1968); The Bean Eaters (1960); Annie Allen (1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971). In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

A Street in Bronzeville (1945)
Aloneness (1971)
Annie Allen (1949)
Aurora (1972)
Beckonings (1975)
Black Love (1981)
Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali (1971)
Blacks (1987)
Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)
Children Coming Home (1991)
Family Pictures (1970)
In the Mecca (1968)
Riot (1970)
Selected Poems (1963)
The Bean Eaters (1960)
The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986)
The Wall (1967)
The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971)
To Disembark (1981)
We Real Cool (1966)
Winnie (1988)

Prose

A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (1975)
Primer for Blacks (1981)
Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972)
Very Young Poets (1983)
Young Poet’s Primer (1981)

Fiction

Maud Martha (1953)

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Clifton, Lucille

Lucille Clifton (born June 27, 1936) is an American poet, writer, and educator from New York. Common topics in her poetry include the celebration of her African American heritage, and feminist themes, with particular emphasis on the female body.

Lucille Clifton (born from Thelma Lucille Sayles) was born June 27, 1936, and raised in Depew, New York. Her high school career was completed at Fosdick-Masten Park High School. She attended Howard University from 1953 to 1955 and graduated from the State University of New York at Fredonia (near Buffalo) in 1955. In 1958 she married Fred James Clifton. She worked as a claims clerk in the New York State Division of Employment, Buffalo (1958-1960), and as literature assistant in the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. (1960-1971). Her first poetry collection Good Times was published in 1969, and listed by The New York Times as one of the year’s 10 best books. From 1971 to 1974 she was poet-in-residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore. From 1979-1985 she was Poet Laureate of the state of Maryland.^[1] From 1982 to 1983 she was visiting writer at Columbia University School of the Arts and at George Washington University. From 1985-1989, Clifton was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.^[2] Since 1991, she has been Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. From 1995 to 1999, she was Visiting Professor at Columbia University. In 2006, she was a fellow at Dartmouth College.

Poetry

• Good Times (Random House, New York, 1969)
• Good News About the Earth (Random House, New York, 1972)
• An Ordinary Woman (Random House, New York, 1974)
• Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1980)
• Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969-1980 (BOA Editions, Brockport, 1987)
• Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, Brockport, 1987)
• Ten Oxherding Pictures (Moving Parts Press, Santa Cruz, 1988).
• Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (BOA Editions, Brockport, 1991)
• The Book of Light (Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, 1993)
• The Terrible Stories (BOA Editions, Brockport, 1996)
• Blessing The Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA Editions, Rochester, 2000)
• Mercy (BOA Editions, Rochester, 2004)
• Voices (BOA Editions, Rochester, 2008)

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Espada, Martin

Martín Espada (born 1957) is a poet and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and Latino poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.

Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was introduced to political activism at an early age by his father, a leader in the Puerto Rican community and the civil rights movement.

Espada received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a J.D. from Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts). For many years, he worked as a tenant lawyer and a supervisor of a legal services program.

In 1982, Espada published his first book of political poems, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, featuring photography by his father. This was followed by Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction (1987) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands. In 1996, he won the American Book Award for his collection Imagine the Angels of Bread. He has also been the recipient of a PEN/Revson Fellowship, the Massachusetts Artist’s Fellowship, and Paterson Poetry Prize, among other honors.

Espada is the Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.

He was the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship.

Books, Poetry, Essays, Translations:
The Republic of Poetry (2006)
Alabanza (2003)
A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000)
Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996)

Winner of the American Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1994)
- Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and a PEN/Revson Fellowship)
- Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction
- The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero

Translation
- The Blood that Keeps Singing
- Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez

Essays
- Zapata’s Disciple (winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award)

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Hughes, Langston

James Mercer Langston Hughes, (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a small child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln, Illinois, that Hughes began writing poetry. Following graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University. During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and a busboy, and traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Review by James Baldwin, New York Times, 1959:

March 29, 1959

Sermons and Blues

By JAMES BALDWIN

SELECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES By Langston Hughes. Drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer.

very time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts–and depressed that he has done so little with them. A real discussion of his work demands more space than I have here, but this book contains a great deal which a more disciplined poet would have thrown into the waste-basket (almost all of the last section, for example).

There are poems which almost succeed but which do not succeed, poems which take refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of the experience! And one sometimes has the impression, as in a poem like “Third Degree”–which is about the beating up of a Negro boy in a police station–that Hughes has had to hold the experience outside him in order to be able to write at all. And certainly this is understandable. Nevertheless, the poetic trick, so to speak, is to be within the experience and outside it at the same time–and the poem fails.

Mr. Hughes is at his best in brief, sardonic asides, or in lyrics like “Mother to Son,” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Or “Dream Variations”:

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me–
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun.
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening. . .
A tall, slim tree. . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

I do not like all of “The Weary Blues,” which copies, rather than exploits, the cadence of the blues, but it comes to a remarkable end. And I am also very fond of “Island,” which begins “Wave of sorrow/Do not drown me now.”

Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music. Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand–or sleight-of-hand–by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary–without the faintest notion of what it really means–the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.

Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into of the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming. “Hey, pop!/Re-bop!/Mop!” conveys much more on Lenox Avenue than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to be.

Hughes is an American Negro poet and has no choice but to be acutely aware of it. He is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.

Hurston, Zora Neale

Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature. Hurston was closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and has influenced such writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara.

In 1975, Ms. Magazine published Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” reviving interest in the author. Hurston’s four novels and two books of folklore resulted from extensive anthropological research and have proven invaluable sources on the oral cultures of African America.

Through her writings, Robert Hemenway wrote in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Hurston “helped to remind the Renaissance–especially its more bourgeois members–of the richness in the racial heritage.”

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891^[1][2] – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston’s four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Zora Neale Hurston on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[3]

Politics

Hurston was a Republican who was generally sympathetic to the Old Right and a fan of Booker T. Washington’s self-help politics. She disagreed with the philosophies (including Communism and the New Deal) supported by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who was in the 1930’s a supporter of the Soviet Union and praised it in several of his poems. Despite much common ground with the Old Right in domestic and foreign policy, Hurston was not a social conservative. She was essentially a libertarian in philosophy. Her writings show skepticism toward traditional religion and affinity for feminist individualism. In this respect, her views were similar to two libertarian novelists who were her contemporaries, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson.^[17]

In 1952, Hurston supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert A. Taft. Like Taft, Hurston was against FDR’s New Deal policies. She also shared his opposition to the Roosevelt/Truman interventionist foreign policy. In the original draft of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston compared the United States government to a “fence” in stolen goods and to a Mafia-like protection racket. Hurston thought it ironic that the same “people who claim that it is a noble thing to die for freedom and democracy … wax frothy if anyone points out the inconsistency of their morals. … We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own.” Roosevelt “can call names across an ocean” for his four freedoms, but he did not have “the courage to speak even softly at home.”^{[clarification needed]} When Truman dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, she called him “the Butcher of Asia.”^[17]

Hurston opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt that if separate schools were truly equal (and she believed that they were rapidly becoming so) educating black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education. In addition, she worried about the demise of black schools and black teachers as a way to pass on cultural tradition to future generations of African-Americans. She voiced this opposition in a letter, “Court Order Can’t Make the Races Mix”, that was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955. Hurston had not reversed her long-time opposition to segregation. Rather, she feared that the Court’s ruling could become a precedent for an all-powerful federal government to undermine individual liberty on a broad range of issues in the future.^[18]

Works

• Color Struck (1925) in Opportunity Magazine
• Sweat (1926)
• How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
• Hoodoo in America (1931) in The Journal of American Folklore
• The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)
• Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
• Mules and Men (1935)
• Tell My Horse (1937)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)
• Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
• Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
• I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (edited by Alice Walker; introduction by Mary Helen Washington) (1979)
• Sanctified Church (1981)
• Spunk: Selected Stories (1985)
• Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play, with Langston Hughes; edited with introductions by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the complete story of the Mule bone controversy.) (1991)
• The Complete Stories (introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke) (1995)
• Barracoon (1999)
• Collected Plays (introduction by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell) (2008)

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Jones, Leroi (see Amiri Baraka)

Jordan, June.

June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher, and committed activist. In her three decade career Jordan made her mark as one of the fiercest and most compassionate voices of her time. She became a passionate voice of a generation battling the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, violence, and human rights. Jordan played an important role in the development of black artistic, social, and politic movements and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.

June Jordan was born in New York City in 1936. Her books of poetry include Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997 (Anchor Books, 1997), Haruko/Love Poems (1994), Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989), Living Room (1985), Passion (1980), and Things That I Do in the Dark (1977). She is also the author of children’s books, plays, a novel, and Poetry for the People: A Blueprint for the Revolution (1995), a guide to writing, teaching and publishing poetry. Her collections of political essays include Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998) and Technical Difficulties (1994). Basic Books published her memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, in 2000.

Jordan has received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the National Association of Black Journalists Award, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People. June Jordan died of breast cancer on June 14, 2002, in Berkeley, California.

K—-

Knight, Etheridge

Etheridge Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1931. Although he dropped out of school at age sixteen (as soon as he was old enough to join the army), his education in the uses and joys of language continued as he explored the world of juke joints, pool halls, and underground poker games. He began to master the art of the toast, a form of long, improvised, humorous poetry that dates back to the 19th century and has its roots in African storytelling. From 1947 to 1951, Knight served in the U.S. Army in Korea, and returning with a shrapnel wound that caused him to fall deeper into a drug addiction that had begun during his service. In 1960 he was arrested for robbery and sentenced to eight years in the Indiana State Prison. During this time he began writing poetry, and he corresponded with and received visits from such established African American literary figures as Dudley Randall and Gwendolyn Brooks. Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press published Poems from Prison (1968), Etheridge Knight’s first book, one year before he was released from prison.

The book was a success, and Knight soon joined such poets as Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez (to whom he was once married) in what came to be called the Black Arts Movement. This movement, according to the poet and critic Larry Neal, was “radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Arts is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.” Knight embraced these ideals in his own work and in 1970 edited a collection entitled Black Voices From Prison. Knight’s books and oral performances drew both popular and critical acclaim, and he received honors from such institutions as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America. In 1990 he earned a bachelor’s degree in American poetry and criminal justice from Martin Center University in Indianapolis. Etheridge Knight died in 1991.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

2 Poems for Black Relocation Centers (1968)
A Poem for Brother Man (1972)
Belly Song and Other Poems (1973)
Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1980)
For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide (1972)
Poems from Prison (1968)
The Essential Etheridge Knight (1986)
The Idea of Ancestry (1968)

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Lorde, Audre

Photo Credit: Elsa Dorfman

Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.

Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, who settled in Harlem. Nearsighted to the point of being legally blind, and the youngest of three daughters, Lorde grew up hearing her mother’s stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four, and her mother taught her to write at around the same time. She wrote her first poem when she was in eighth grade. Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, she chose to drop the “y” from her name while still a child.^[1]

After graduating from Hunter College High School, Lorde attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959 and graduated with a bachelors degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself by working various odd jobs such as factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor.

In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period she described as a time of affirmation and renewal: she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde went to college, worked as a librarian, continued writing and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village.

Lorde furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in library science in 1961. She also worked during this time as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins: they divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City, where she remained until 1968.

During a year in residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Lorde met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, the woman who was to be her romantic partner until 1989, after which she became involved with Gloria Joseph, her partner until her death aged 58 on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, after a 14-year struggle with breast cancer.

In her own words, Lorde was a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet“.^[2] In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known”.

Audre Lorde was professor of English at John Jay College of criminal justice and Hunter College. She was the poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. She died of breast cancer in 1992. The Collected Poems Of Audre Lorde was published in 1997.

Poetry

A contemporary of such feminist poets as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, Lorde also expressed her womanhood through poetry. While Plath and Rich were changing the traditions of both prose and poetry to render them more autobiographical, Lorde combined genres at will: to her, life was essential to text, so everything became autobiographical.

Lorde focused her discussion of difference not only on differences between groups of women but between conflicting differences within the individual. “I am defined as other in every group I’m part of,” she declared. “The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression”.^[10] She described herself both as a part of a “continuum of women”^[11] and a “concert of voices” within herself.^[12]

Lorde’s conception of her many layers of selfhood is replicated in the multi-genres of her work. Critic Carmen Birkle writes, “Her multicultural self is thus reflected in a multicultural text, in multi-genres, in which the individual cultures are no longer separate and autonomous entities but melt into a larger whole without losing their individual importance”.^[13] Her refusal to be placed in a particular category, whether social or literary, was characteristic of her determination to come across as an individual rather than a stereotype.

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Sanchez, Sonia.

Born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1943 she moved to Harlem with her sister to live with their father and his third wife. She earned a B.A. in political science from Hunter College in 1955. She also did postgraduate work at New York University and studied poetry with Louise Bogan. Sanchez formed a writers’ workshop in Greenwich Village, attended by such poets as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), and Larry Neal. Along with Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight, she formed the “Broadside Quartet” of young poets, introduced and promoted by Dudley Randall.

Works in Poetry and Plays:

Homegirls and Handgrenades (White Pine Press, 2007), Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999); Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998); Does your house have lions? (1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award; Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995); Under a Soprano Sky (1987); Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978); A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973); Love Poems (1973); Liberation Poem (1970); We a BaddDDD People (1970); and Homecoming (1969).

Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (1995), I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t (1982), Malcolm Man/Don’t Live Here No Mo’ (1979), Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us? (1974), Dirty Hearts ‘72 (1973), The Bronx Is Next (1970),and Sister Son/ji (1969). Her books for children include A Sound Investment and Other Stories (1979), The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head (1973), and It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971). She has also edited two anthologies: We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans (1973) and Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin”at You (1971).

Sundiata, Sekou

Blues, jazz, funk, and Afro-Caribbean percussion surround the soulful voice of Harlem-born poet Sekou Sundiata on his recordings, The Blue Oneness of Dreams and Longstoryshort. His words speak of black culture and tradition, often with a political edge. “People be droppin’ revolution like it was a pick-up line,” he says in Longstoryshort. “You wouldn’t use that word if you knew what it meant.”

Sekou Sundiata was an African-American poet and performer, as well as a teacher at New York City’s New School. Famous students include musicians Ani DiFranco and Mike Doughty. His plays include The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop, The Mystery of Love, Udu, and The 51st Dream State. He also released several albums, including Longstoryshort and The Blue Oneness of Dreams.^[1] The Blue Oneness of Dreams was nominated for a Grammy Award. ^[2]

His subjects included Jimi Hendrix, Nelson Mandela, and reparations for slavery.

Mr. Sundiata was a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow, a Columbia University Revson Fellow, a Master Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, the first Writer-in-Residence at the New School University in New York, and a professor at Eugene Lang College.

Performances

Sundiata’s works combined poetry, music and drama. His musical influences included jazz, blues, funk and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. He worked closely with Craig Harris on works such as Udu about slavery in modern Mauritania and The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop about African Americans reaching adulthood in the 1960s. ^[4]

Sundiata based his one man show Blessing the Boats on experiences of heroin addiction (back in the 60s), a car crash and a kidney transplant from a friend. He toured the show around the United States and internationally.^[5] The impact of the show inspired members of the audience to volunteer to become organ donors.^[6]

His last work, the 51st (dream) state, featured music, dance, video and poetry about the responses to the September 11, 2001 attacks.^[7] After a performance at the Melbourne Festival,^[8] the show was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2006. ^[9]

Teaching career

Sundiata taught writing at New School in New York City . DiFranco was one of his students and claimed at the time of his death that Sundiata “taught me everything I know about poetry.”^[12]

Mike Doughty also studied under Sundiata in DiFranco’s class. He wrote “Screenwriter’s Blues” which was a minor hit for his band Soul Coughing in the 1990s, while studying in Sundiata’s class. ^[13]

Another musician/poet who studied with Sundiata (at Eugene Lang @ The New School) was Spin Doctors’ lead singer CHRIS BARRON. In fact, it was Sekou that coined the name “Spin Doctors” for the newly formed band in 1988/89.

From the Village Voice:

Sekou Sundiata, 1948–2007

Vernon Reid remembers the seminal black artist and activist

Vernon Reid

Tuesday, July 17th 2007

The untimely death last week of the visionary activist, poet, playwright, songwriter, educator, and vocalist Sekou Sundiata is a terrible shock to the many communities that his extraordinary life and art touched. Sekou was truly a great man, an artist whose incisive analysis of modern society was equaled by a deep compassion for, and understanding of, the human condition. The sound of Sekou’s voice was iconic and electrifying, its deep melody the sound of a griot for the ages. It was the sound of unflinching honesty, warmheartedness, wry comedy, righteous anger, and elegiac longing. It was as distinctive as Coltrane’s horn or Jimi’s guitar. Sekou loved everyday people, their madness and occasional genius, their inexplicable and contradictory natures.

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Wheatley, Phillis:

• the 1st African American to publish a book of poetry
• the 1st African American poet
• the 1st Female Poet in America
  

Phillis Wheatley (1753 – December 5, 1784) was the first published African American poet whose writings helped create the genre of African American literature.^[1] She was born in Gambia, Africa, and became a slave at age seven. She was purchased by the Boston Wheatley family, who taught her to read and write, and helped encourage her poetry. Her book of poetry, “Poems of Various Subjects, Religious, and Moral” was published in September 1, 1773.  She died without a headstone on her grave and in poverty at the age of 31 . She was able to ‘write herself out of slavery’ yet remained in subservient positions due to America’s racial social ideology and laws.

Born around 1753 in an area of present-day Senegal, Wheatley was kidnapped and carried to America in 1761 aboard a slave ship called “Phyllis” (from which she received her name). She was purchased in Boston by a wealthy merchant named John Wheatley. John and his wife Susanna instructed her and encouraged her education,^[3] including study of foreign languages such as Latin, and history. Phyllis was tutored by the Wheatleys’ son, Nathaniel, in English, Latin, history, geography, religion, and the Bible. Wheatley was baptized into the Christian religion at Old South Meeting House.^[4]

Williams, Saul

Saul Stacey Williams (born February 29, 1972) is an American poet, writer, actor and musician known for his blend of poetry and alternative hip hop and for his leading role in the 1998 independent film Slam.

Saul Williams: Dreadlocked Dervish of Words
A leading voice on the spoken-word scene, Saul Williams began astonishing open mic audiences with his impassioned tongue-twisting verse in the mid-1990s and eventually became a grand slam champion at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. In 1996, he led the four-person New York team to the finals of the National Poetry Slam competition, a fierce battle of verse that was chronicled in the documentary film Slamnation. Two years later, in a role that featured many of his own compositions, Williams played an imprisoned street poet in the award-winning film, Slam, for which Esquire magazine deemed him a “dreadlocked dervish of words.” A self-proclaimed disciple of Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka, Williams combines the rhythms and themes of Beat and Black Arts poets in his work. His three collections of poetry–The Seventh Octave, Sãhe, and , said the shotgun to the head–tackle difficult social and political issues as well as intangible questions about religion and spirituality. In performance, his work is full of a pulsing frenzy, which the New York Times described as “mind-twisting cosmic rumination with hallucinatory science-fiction scenarios that the poet delivers with an incantatory fervor.”

The album Saul Williams was influenced by a wide range of artists including Jimmy Hendrix, Radiohead, and the Mars Volta, and resulted in a fusion that Williams calls “industrial punk hop.” Brian Orloff, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, explained: “Musically, Saul Williams matches Williams’s lyrics with gritty, frittered guitar and urgent rhythms. ‘List of Demands (Reparations)’ finds Williams singing, “I gotta list of demands written on the palm of my hands’ over a staccato guitar riff that sounds like gunfire.’”

“I’m definitely a hip-hop head by nature,” Williams has said. “I’m there in the mix, so I’m turned on by the same things, nod my head to the same things. Even if I’m writing a piece of prose, there is still an intrinsic rhythm that I’m looking for, even without rhyme, even without beats, even without music and microphones.”

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