Writing

  • I’ve been flirting with this book on and off throughout the year. However, as the year nears its completion, I find the very first poem of the Nobel prize-winning book by Derek Walcott haunting me. Take a look. Book 1: Chapter 1 – Section 1 (Excerpt) "This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them…

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  • Gwendolyn Brooks on Langston Hughes: “I met Langston Hughes when I was sixteen. When I went to Metropolitan Community Church to show him some of my poems at the behest of my mother who accompanied me and saw to it that I did this. He was most kind and read the poems right there after…

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  • Voices from Haiti: Storm (English Version) by Kwame Dawes English version of the visual poem Storm with poetry by Kwame Dawes, images by Andre Lambertson. For Malia Jean From here the mountains around Port-au-Prince are green; too far to see the denuded hillside, too far to see the brown wounds, too far to see the…

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  • Reggae for me is very much associated with the ’70’s, with a time of a lot of self-questioning, nationally, individually. And not just self-questioning, because also I think it was very much a time when people were open to ideas about what I will just loosely call the spiritual world, you know, the inner world.…

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  • Frank X. Walker (Poet)

    The other day, roam reading my way through Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, I found myself reading a delightfully powerfully poem by Frank X. Walker. I liked the poem, titled Homeopathic, so much that I googled him to see what I could find out. Homeopathic – Frank X Walker The unripe…

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  • Octavia Butler Interview

    Bio on AALBC Octavia Butler’s Amazon page

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  • I don’t know if the Heinneman African Writer Series (AWS) was one of those Chess record label deals where the artists didn’t get paid according to the value of their work to the music appreciating audience but rather according to the skinflint economics of record label owners. I haven’t researched it so I can’t say.…

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  •                                                                                                                                                                                                “You hearers, seers, imaginers, thinkers, rememberers, you prophets called to communicate truths of the living way to a people fascinated unto death, you called to link memory with forelistening, to join the uncountable seasons of our flowing to unknown tomorrows even more numerous, communicators doomed to pass on truths of our origins to a…

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  •   Roaming the blogosphere as I am wont to do, I came across a challenge on calyx press’ blog. Of course, at 43, I do not qualify as a “young feminist” (if I ever did) but still it set me to thinking about my intentions to write a review of Home Girls: A Black Feminist…

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  • the things children say

    my child asked me the other day if someone we’re familiar with "thinks well"? i laughed and laughed. what a question from a six yr old! after i finished laughing (and calling everyone i know) i asked him "do you want the truth or a child appropriate answer? he’s my child: he wanted the truth.…

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