In Case You Missed It: Thanks Ronaldo!

Ronaldo Wilson was in beautiful form this past Saturday, when giving a fantasic and generous reading.

Here is the introduction by CAConrad:
Queer activist and filmmaker Marlon Riggs created the documentary COLOR ADJUSTMENT over a decade ago, tracing and exposing white, corporate America's racist template for network television. One of the most telling interviews on this embedded racism was with Esther Rolle, star of, and co-creator of the show GOOD TIMES. She told how network executives tried to convince her that it would be better for the show if she would agree to make her character a single mother. But she had a mission to make the black man visible as father and husband on network TV. Before GOOD TIMES all black women on television were single, or single mothers. On the first day of shooting John Amos, hired to play her husband on the show, had been quietly sent home and removed from the script. When Esther Rolle came to work and found out she REFUSED to allow the cameras to roll until her husband was written back into the script and returned to the set. She finally won the argument, and helped change the history of the disappeared. Such dedication to LIVE RIGHT by this world keeps true to the words of Frederick Douglass when he said, "POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND! IT NEVER DID AND IT NEVER WILL!" The poetry and work of Ronaldo Wilson brings further light to the visible and invisible. Author Wayne Koestenbaum writes, "I applaud Ronaldo Willson's path-breaking movement into what has never, never, in history, been said. About sexuality, in particular, these poems speak with incorrigible and raving clarity." Please help me welcome Ronaldo Wilson!

And here is a link to an audio file of Ronaldo's reading. It starts mid-poem, unfortunately, but is otherwise fantastic

zSHARE - 04 Track 04 4.m4a

and This Saturday: an evening with Ronaldo Wilson!

Please join us for an evening with the incredible Ronaldo Wilson and a reading and discussion of The Visible Black Body: An Interventionist's Reflection

Saturday March 13, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE


For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Claudia Rankine and Poems of the Black Object. He holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, is a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, and currently teaches at Mount Holyoke College.

Find him online here and here.

This Friday: Imortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker

Please join us for an evening of film and conversation as we present, along with Kino 21 and the Poetry Center, Immortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker.

Filmmaker Cathy Cook will join us along with Special Guest Jonathan Skinner, who will be presenting his talk: Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories

Friday March 12, 2010
7:30pm
Artist Television Access
992 Valencia Street, San Francisco
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE



Filmmaker Cathy Cook takes cues from Niedecker’s work and the Wisconsin heritage they share to explore the poetry and life of Lorine Niedecker (1903 – 1970.) Cook has exhibited her award-winning work extensively in both solo and group shows including screenings at MOMA and the Whitney Museum; she is an Associate Professor of Film/Video in Visual Arts at The University of Maryland – Baltimore County.




Jonathan Skinner’s poetry collections include With Naked Foot and Political Cactus Poems. He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics, which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Skinner teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College, in Central Maine.

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Harryette!

We had a rare treat to enjoy Harryette Mullen last Friday.

Here is the introduction from CAConrad:

On the topic of bodies we have with us tonight Harryette Mullen. We will start by calling on a couple of transformed bodies of poets who have passed on, the missing bodies we honor.

(Samantha lights the half stick of cedar incense)

Cedar is a scent associated with the god Mercury, and is used to close the gap of time and space between us and the ones we wish to contact. This incense was a gift from poet kari edwards a month before she died, incense she brought from India with her partner Fran Blau.

When kari lived in Philadelphia in the 1980's she made friends with poet Gil Ott at the Painted Bride Arts Center. Gil was also friends with Harryette Mullen, and published her books S*PeRM**K*T and Muse & Drudge on his Singing Horse Press. When kari was on a book tour with her book "iduna" she hoped to see Gil Ott when she read in Philadelphia, but he died a few days before her reading. The night of her reading the poets in the room were somewhat melancholy due to the passing of Gil just days before.

The first thing kari did was to talk about Gil and how -- as everyone in the room knew -- he started all of his readings off with the song "The Moon Does Not Run On Gasoline" by San Francisco poet Kush. So kari sang the song, which translated all sorrow in an instant that night, but also transformed the way the room could open that night. We have a recording of Gil Ott singing that song for us to open the topic of bodies by his friend Harryette Mullen tonight, let's listen.

(Samantha plays Gil singing)

Please welcome Harryette Mullen.


SEE TRACK FOUR: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Frequency.html


And a reading report from Robin Treblay-McGaw (which can also be found on xpoetics.blogspot.com)

The Bay Area was treated to two appearances of Harryette Mullen in one weekend. On Friday night Mullen was part of a group reading in Berkeley and on Saturday night, she ignited Timken Hall at CCA in San Francisco. Mullen began the evening by explaining that she wasn't going to be talking about poetry but would talk about what she's been working on for the last couple of years, a project that entails, as Mullen said, finding where the bodies are buried. Harryette Mullen has been engaged in a genealogical investigation to document her family history. This is a fraught project since many of Mullen's ancestors are not well documented. Often there were no birth or marriage records for blacks. Prior to 1870, blacks were not uniformly included in the U.S. Census. As a result, Mullen's project has extended beyond her family alone. She's let this investigation expand sideways, revising her idea of what family is, including ancestral cousins as well.

One of the things Mullen discovers through this process is that in the 19th century, particularly for blacks, it is possible to find documentation of a person's life through death records only. For example there are databases that contain information about black union (and a few confederate) soldiers involved in the Civil War. One such database is the National Graves Registration Project maintained by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Other sources of information include insurance company lists of insured slaves. Slave-owners would often take out an insurance policy on slaves who were expected to die within a year.

Witness the difficulty of tracing family history when a relative is never recorded as someone--someone who was born, married, had children. Officially, they exist only in their dying, and sometimes not even then.

Here the official records--or their absences and omissions--and family history and knowledge rub up against one another, revealing contradictions, social and political histories, and trauma. Mullen discovered that the causes of death listed for some of her ancestors include conditions related to malnutrition and starvation, such as Pellagra.

The complexities and construction of race as a category assert themselves.
A census record might one year record someone as black, at another time, mulatto. The category of "race" and who defines and names and records it is tessellated and troubled. One of Mullen's ancestors was said to be Mexican. While Mullen suggested that this might be true, it seemed more likely an intentional ambiguity for a black family living in a largely white part of town in the late 19th century. Mullen's family tree, like a good deal of American family trees, includes both black and white ancestors. While some white relatives discovered by Mullen in Texas have embraced her, her inquiries have not been met always with such interest. Trying to locate the burial ground of one relative, Mullen contacted a white family in Alabama whose 19th century ancestors owned slaves, including, I believe, one of Mullen's relatives. The family sold one of these slaves (one of Harryette's ancestors) so that one of their white sons could attend medical school. Once they understood Mullen's project--her search for her ancestor's burial site--this family promptly cut off communication.

Names. Starvation. Lives. People owning other People. Resting places.

Harryette said that her project had not produced any writing--poetry or prose--that really satisfied her and she is unclear where the project is going and whether or not it will be more than a family genealogical inquiry, when it will stop. I think many in the audience were hopeful that the project would continue and take a form that we might encounter again. It is heart-breaking and important work.

I find so much of Harryette Mullen's writing to be engaged with history in so many different ways. Mullen has investigated slave narratives in her dissertation and her poetry dives into history and language's troubled archives. In the work collected in Recyclopedia, Mullen enables the sort of “activity of thinking and imagination that open[s] out vast possibilities not just of memory but of counter-memory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” that David Scott describes (vi).* Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen re-makes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its material alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. She interrogates and improvises, and then re-uses them, stretching them to their utmost. In the process, these discursive investigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies.



Past perfect food sticks in the craw. Curdles the pulse.
Coops up otherwise free ranging birds whose plucked
wings beat hearts over easy. Flapping aerobically, cocks
walk on brittle zeros. They make and break and scramble
to get ahead. Whisk the yokels into shape. Use their pecker
order to separate the whites (S*PeRM**K*T).



Harryette Mullen shows us how even "bad" or contaminated, and half-erased traumatic histories might be made to speak volubly and differently. A poetics of history and knowledges. Discrepant interdependencies, crimes, pleasures, sufferings. There are wounds. And words. There are names: Hannah Strange, Flemming Mullen, Horace Dangerfield, Granville Spangler....

While it comes from a different register entirely, a portion of Jacqes Ranciere's The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, seems apt:

...this means nonhistory and history, the power of articulation of names and events that is tied to the ontological indeterminacy of the narrative, but that nevertheless is alone suited to preserving the specificity of a historical science in general. The revolution in historical study is the arrangement of a space for the conjunction of contradictories" (6-7).


I can't stop thinking about the evening.


*Scott, David. “Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory.” Small Axe 26 12.2 (June 2008): v-xvi.

This Saturday! an evening with Harryette Mullen!

Please join us for an evening with the amazing Harryette Mullen.

Saturday March 6, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE


For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

_________________

from the Poetry Foundation website:

Harryette Mullen is a poet and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and African-American literature. Her poetry has been hailed by critics as unique, powerful, and challenging. Elisabeth A. Frost wrote in Contemporary Literature: "Crossing the lines between often isolated aesthetic camps, Harryette Mullen has pioneered her own form of bluesy, disjunctive lyric poetry, combining a concern for the political issues raised by identity politics with a poststructualist emphasis on language."

Mullen was born in Alabama, but spent most of her childhood in Texas. "I've loved to write from childhood. I wrote to entertain my family, my friends, and myself," she told Emily Allen Williams in an interview for the African American Review. Mullen began writing poetry more seriously in high school, when she had her first poem published in a local newspaper. After receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, she went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation on slave narratives. Even when writing essays and fiction, though, poetry continued to be important to her. "I feel that I need to write in order to know what I think and what I believe," she told Williams. "It's a way of keeping in touch with the inner landscape, I guess. And it makes me more alert to the outer landscape."

A key aspect of Mullen's relationship to poetry developed when she began going to poetry readings. "It was through the poetry-[reading] circuit that I began to realize that poetry is not just something on the page, but a community of readers and writers," she told Williams. Mullen's poetry draws on oral tradition, music, and the spoken word. Mullen described her intention to Frost in an interview for Contemporary Literature: "I am writing for the eye and the ear at once, at that intersection of orality and literacy, wanting to make sure that there is a troubled, disturbing aspect to the work so that it is never just a 'speakerly' or a 'writerly' text."

Mullen's first book of poetry, Tree Tall Woman, was published before she went to graduate school; the poems from this first book are included, along with other early poetry, in the more recent publication Blues Baby: Early Poems. Trimmings, her second book, came ten years after Tree Tall Woman. Partisan Review's Stephen Yenser called it "an ebulliently feminist, black and bluesy, bebop, wicked, scatty, addictive sequence of mazy prose poems, ostensibly about wardrobe accessories and the ramifications thereof, and in fact about language and semiotics in general." Mullen's characteristic dense, meaning-packed style is in full play here; Yenser wrote of her poems, "Compact, sometimes no more than eight or ten words, they are as loaded as chocolate truffles and the finest Vegas dice." Drawing much inspiration from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Mullen is unafraid to delve into the racial subtext ignored by Stein; as Molly Bendall noted in Antioch Review, she "brings her own contemporary African-American female voice to these poems." In one particular section, for example, she examines the common representation of femininity as "pink" and "white," inquiring how a black female might interact with these poetic constructions. Frost wrote in Women's Review of Books that "these relationships among femininity, clothes and language are beautifully orchestrated in word-play that dramatizes complex issues about gender and culture without offering easy or predictable answers."

Mullen followed Trimmings with S*PeRM**K*T, published the next year. Like the previous book, it consists of short, fragmented prose poems, this time with the wordplay revolving around the supermarket—both the concept and, as in the title of the piece, the word itself. "Mullen speeds up and down the aisle-like margins of American life spying out those strangest interstices of commodity and racial culture," MultiCultural Review's Aldon L. Nielsen explained. Race, sex, gender, and consumer culture interact in thought-provoking ways as Mullen's poetry comments on the racial and erotic subtexts of our commodified society. "The intertwinings of the commercial and the erotic are the crucial subject of Mullen's slim book—itself 'packaged' in a saranwraplike wrap-around photo of a meat case of packaged beef and interlarded with other photos of stocked shelves," Yenser wrote in Yale Review. Mullen explained to Williams some of the political ideas she explored while writing S*PeRM**K*T: "When I was writing this poem it made me very conscious of what I was doing in the supermarket—how we behave as consumers and define ourselves by the products we purchase. . . . We really are what we eat, what we consume. As a nation, as a culture, as a society, we consume way more than the rest of the world."

Mullen's fourth book of poetry, Muse and Drudge, examines gender, race, and art in an exploration of "the tension and creative possibilities between inspirational, existential, and mundane work," George Yancy wrote in CLA Journal. The title mentions two female roles common throughout the history of art: the idealized muse who inspires the artist, and the laboring drudge whose behind-the-scenes toil supports him (a "him" because of the male-oriented tradition to which Mullen is referring.) An exploration of race also plays a large role in these poems, which, as Yancy pointed out, are "hypertextually and intertextually linked to the lived experiences of being black in America and the religious and spiritual semiotic spaces of Africa and Afro-America." In fact, Mullen told Frost that the book "was written specifically to try to bring different audiences together;" after discovering that her two previous books reached a mostly white audience, Mullen wanted to her work to reach the black community as well. However, she understands that the dense wordplay and numerous references that contribute to her highly intertextual work require every person to read and understand the poem differently. She told Frost: "The reader is getting whatever the reader can get. . . . Black people get certain things particularly, and Spanish speakers get certain other things. There are people who recognize Sappho lines or Bessie Smith lines."

Muse and Drudge contrasts to her previous free verse and prose poems in that it is written in fairly regular quatrains; yet, as American Book Review's Mark Scroggins noted, she still "manages to keep her readers consistently off balance, surprised by a rhyme or disappointed at its absence." Mullen explained to Frost the meaning of this style: "It is very much a book of echoes. Some of the fragments rhyme and some don't, and that is basically the principle of the book—the recycling of fragments of language." At the same time, Scroggins noted, she "makes it all seem so easy: the language here dances, shakes, and splits itself into puns, allusions, and double-entendre, all the while maintaining a jaunty funkiness."

Mullen's wordplay becomes even more structurally avant-garde in her next book, Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Carol Muske-Dukes wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that "poetic expression here springs from a formal device, a game, a premeditated romp: a little like the Muse playing Scrabble"; many of these devices, such as replacing nouns with ones found seven entries away in the dictionary, were developed by the international literary group OuLiPo. "More diverse" than her previous books, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Sleeping with the Dictionary is filled with styles ranging from "exhaustive alphabetical language salads" to "strange rewrites of classics" (two poems that rework a famous Shakespeare sonnet). "Many of the poems' titles are careful twists on dead metaphors and other commonly used phrases," noted Hoke S. Glover II in Black Issues Book Review; "This is her art: to reconstruct, redefine and create out of splicing and stitching back together the pieces of meaning in language."

UCLA Today's Meg Sullivan felt that Sleeping with the Dictionary assumes "a more playful posture" than Mullen's previous works, but other critics felt the opposite, that the work is more serious. With Mullen's poetry these binaries of play and work, comedy and tragedy, coexist. "For me the comic is the other side of the coin of tragedy or oppression. They work together. I know people sometimes have a problem when the tone shifts abruptly. Some people find that disturbing, but for me it feels right," she told Frost. Mullen's poetry continually challenges the reader, and does so on many levels. As Yancy wrote, Mullen is "a word warrior. She preaches, poeticizes, and raps us, indeed, envelops us, into a tropological maze. She invites us to enjoy the logic of discursive possibilities, emotional entanglements, and the force of language."

Mullen told CA: "Writing became important to me when I was very young. It was the only way I could communicate with my father after my parents were divorced. My mother believed in educating 'the whole child.' She made sure my sister and I always had books to read, and she somehow found money to pay for music and dance lessons. She also encouraged us to draw and write. My sense of poetry was awakened by the formal and informal, written and oral rhymes and rhythms of family, church, and school.

"In all of my books, I try to find a balance between serious work and humorous play. At the moment, Sleeping with the Dictionary is my favorite because I enjoyed experimenting with different ways of creating poetry."

CAREER
Poet and educator. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, professor of African-American and other ethnic literature; University of California, Los Angeles, professor of African-American literature and creative writing. Also worked in Artists-in-Schools program sponsored by Texas Commission on the Arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
POETRY
Tree Tall Woman, Energy Earth (Galveston, TX), 1981.
Trimmings, Tender Buttons (New York, NY), 1991.
S*PeRM**K*T, Singing Horse (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Muse and Drudge, Singing Horse Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Blues Baby: Early Poems ( "Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry"), Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 2002.
Sleeping with the Dictionary, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2002.
Contributor of essays to periodicals and journals, including American Book Review, Callaloo, Chain, Diacritics, Light Work Annual, Antioch Review, and MELUS. Fiction and poetry published in numerous journals, magazines, anthologies, and textbooks.

FURTHER READINGS
PERIODICALS
African American Review, winter, 2000, Emily Allen Williams, "The Queen of Hip Hyperbole" (interview), p. 701.
American Book Review, May, 1997, Mark Scroggins, review ofMuse and Drudge, p. 17.
Antioch Review, winter, 1993, Molly Bendall, review of Trimmings, p. 154.
Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2002, Hoke S. Glover III, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary, p. 63.
Callaloo, summer, 1996, Calvin Bedient, "The Solo Mysterioso Blues: An Interview with Harryette Mullen," pp. 651-669.
CLA Journal, June, 2001, George Yancy, review of Muse and Drudge, pp. 522-527.
Contemporary Literature, fall, 2000, Elisabeth A. Frost, "An Interview with Harryette Mullen," pp. 397-421.
Georgia Review, fall, 1996, Fred Chappell, review of Muse and Drudge, pp. 584-600.
Los Angeles Time Book Review, March 31, 2002, Carol Muske-Dukes, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary, p. 6.
MultiCultural Review, March, 1994, Aldon L. Nielsen, review of S*PeRM*K*T, pp. 72-73.
Partisan Review, Volume 61, 1994, Stephen Yenser, review of Trimmings, pp. 350-355.
Publishers Weekly, September 25, 1995, review of Muse and Drudge, pp. 51-52; December 17, 2001, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary, p. 85.
Sulfur, fall, 1992, Juliana Spahr, review of Trimmings, pp. 265-266.
Women's Review of Books, February, 1993, Elisabeth Frost, review of Trimmings, pp. 11-12.
Yale Review, April, 1994, Stephen Yenser, review of S*PeRM*K*T, pp. 161-181.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets Web site, http://www.poets.org/ (August 1, 2001), biography of Mullen.
Arras, http:// www.arras.net/ (May 30, 2003), review of Sleeping with the Dictionary.
Bucknell University Press Web site, http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/univ_Press/ (May 30, 2003).
Center for African American Studies at UCLA Web site, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/caas/ (May 30, 2003), biography of Mullen.
New York Times, http: // www.nytimes.com/ (December 29, 2002), Mary Park, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary.
UCLA Today online, http:// www.today.ucla.edu/ (May 30, 2003), Meg Sullivan, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary.
University of California Press Web site, http://www.ucpress.edu/ (May 30, 2003).

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Taylor and Lasana!

Here's the intro (written by CA Conrad) for these two fantastic readers! It was a pretty spectacular night!


Flying surveillance robots the size of insects will have prototypes completed in 2010at the University of Waterloo, Wright State, and Harvard.

The four-winged Wright Dragon-Flyer boasts impressive speeds and state-of-the-art maneuverability, and is said to be the size of an actual dragon fly. Our ability to hide and escape will soon become the new fiction.

Poets Lasana Sekou and Taylor Brady enter the magnetic fields of empire's rancor and tyranny, their poems signaling through the new killing fields and sedated living room walls, defying the ranks of death-as-cure. Millions of years of evolution have formed the minds of poets to counter the leaders and allies of empire: corporate, academic, governmental, etc.

At Harvard they are hard at work perfecting flying surveillance robots the size of common house flies which operate on optical and chemical sensors, and have communication systems which will allow them to exist in colonies and create autonomous flight patterns together to optimize their skills for locating programmed targets.

Sekou and Brady are poets who experience the same gravitational pull as any spy, human or robotic. They operate their own optical and chemical sensors, and have communication systems which also conduct autonomous flight patterns.

Please help me welcome the addressing of empire from poets Lasana Sekou, and Taylor Brady.

This Friday: Taylor Brady and Lasana Sekou on Empires!

Please join us for a reading with Taylor Brady and Lasana Sekou on Empires.

Friday February 26, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE


For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

____________________________________________

Lasana M. Sekou is the author of 13 books of poetry, monologues, and short stories. He is a leading St. Martin writer and is considered as one of the prolific Caribbean poets of his generation. Reviewers have compared Sekou’s poetry to the works of a range of poetic giants, from Aimé Césaire to Oswald Mtshali, from Kamau Brathwaite to Dylan Thomas, from e.e. cummings to Linton Kwesi Johnson. However, writes literary critic Howard Fergus in his book Love Labor Liberation in Lasana Sekou, “The voice that reaches us is sui generis, unique and Sekouesque.” Sekou can be heard reciting his poetry to music on the The Salt Reaper Audio CD. His books, such as the critically reviewed The Salt Reaper – poems from the flats, along with 37 Poems, Nativity and monologues for today, and Brotherhood of the Spurs have been required reading at Caribbean and North American universities. He is the editor of National Symbols of St. Martin – A Primer and producer of Fête – The first recording of Traditional St. Martin festive music by Tanny & The Boys. Sekou’s poetry and reviews about his work have appeared in Callaloo, The Massachusetts Review, Del Caribe, De Gids, Das Gedicht, Prometeo, Revue Noire, World Literature Today, Caribbean Quarterly, Postcolonial Text, Caribbean Review of Books, Boundary 2, Harriet, The Jamaica Gleaner, The Daily Herald, Calabash and Repeating Islands. His poems have been translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Turkish, and Chinese. A graduate of Stony Brook University (BA/Int’l. Relations) and Howard University (MA/Mass Communication), Sekou has presented papers and recited his poetry at cultural and literary conferences and festivals in the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. Awards and honors include an International Writers Workshop Visiting Fellow, a James Michener Fellow, a knighthood (The Netherlands), Recognition for literary excellence in the service of Caribbean unity (Dominican Republic), Conscious Lyrics Artist of the Decade, and the CTO Award of Excellence. Lasana M. Sekou is an advocate for the independence of St. Martin, which is a colony of France and the Netherlands. The new edition of Nativity/Nativité/Natividad will appear in 2010 as the author’s first title published in English with French and Spanish translations in one volume.

Find work online by Lasana Sekou here.

Taylor Brady lives in San Francisco. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently Occupational Treatment (2006), and Yesterday's News (2005), and is the co-author with Rob Halpern of Snow Sensitive Skin (2007). Recent poems, beginning to accumulate under the title Pamphlets, Rants, Tracts & Ballads, attempt a series of extrapolations, re-readings, and polemics with and against the grain of the writers and musicians who instruct him. He is active in the Nonsite Collective, and has recently edited the collected essays of Will Alexander for 2010 publication.

Listen to him read with Rob Halpern here.