Best-selling writer E. Lynn Harris can still remember the first time he realized he was poor.

His family had been invited to the housewarming of a well-to-do family in his hometown of Fayetteville, Ark., and Harris, then a young boy fresh from an afternoon of playing outside, was sitting in the living room when another guest remarked on his appearance. For much of the visit, he tried desperately to tuck his bare, dusty feet underneath the sofa.

E. Lynn Harris

It was those childhood memories that helped motivate his success in later years.

"I didn't grow up in the kind of environment that my characters grew up in, or the kind of environment that I live in now," the 52-year-old author says. "It was one of the things that I always aspired to."

His fame has made him a part of a more privileged world, and his success can be partly attributed to showing his readers a world with which they were previously unfamiliar: the secret world of professional, bisexual black men living as heterosexuals.

Last week, Harris was back after a two-year hiatus with his 10th novel, "Just Too Good to Be True." In some ways, the book returns to some of his typical themes - family, relationships, fame - but Harris also takes on new territory, focusing for the first time on a straight relationship.

Please continue to Full Story

The heat did not stop the crowds from attending the 10th annual Harlem Book Fair yesterday.

Bookworms browsed the fair's 300 outdoor tables, which featured both authors and publishers.

Photo by Eric L. Jones, GBMNews Photojournalist

Photo by Eric L. Jones, GBMNews Photojournalist

Photo by Eric L. Jones, GBMNews Photojournalist

The fair also showcased the largest amount of African-American literature in the nation.

Please continue to Full Story

GLBT Organizations Build Bridges Between Generations of GLBT Storytellers

San Francisco, CA - July 4, 2008 – The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society and the Lambda Literary Foundation have joined forces to celebrate the contributions of three generations of GLBT Storytellers.

The two organizations will host a series of conversations, entitled “Passing On The Pen,” designed to pair some of the pioneers of GLBT literature with today’s emerging GLBT storytellers. “This is the first time anyone has ever done anything like this” says Michael Nava, author and winner of five Lambda Literary Awards. “It's a powerhouse lineup, bringing together some astonishing talent and people who I have read and respected for many years as well as some wonderful new writers.”

From March through December, the two organizations will present monthly events pairing authors from the early days of the GLBT movement with current day storytellers. Each event will be held in the gallery of the GLBT Historical society from 6:30 to 8:30, and will be free of charge and open to the public.

On July 8th, celebrated African-American queer storytellers Jewelle Gomez, the author of seven books including the double Lambda Literary Award-winning novel, The Gilda Stories; and Frederick Smith, the author of Down for Whatever and Right Side of the Wrong Bed will be the featured authors in the series.

Please continue to Full Story

Writers probe whether a revolutionary art form has matured enough to remake politics and culture

By Saul Austerlitz

All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America
By John McWhorter
Gotham, 186 pp., $20


Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence
By Keli Goff
Basic Civitas, 294 pp., paperback, $16.95

The hip-hop generation: The phrase has a certain summational ring, an aura of capturing a kernel of truth about American youth in the same way that Generation X seemed to define an earlier cohort. A nation of millions, raised on Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," Jay-Z, and Kanye West, will rise to seize power from greedy capitalist fat-cats and neoconservative warmongers. Hip-hop, the revolutionary art form of the past quarter-century, will expand its reach into spheres beyond music and culture, remaking politics in its image.

Photo illustration by Josue Evilla

Or will it? Two new books examine the promise of the hip-hop generation, wondering what - if anything - will be its political legacy. John McWhorter's "All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America" and Keli Goff's "Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence" reach diametrically opposed conclusions about hip-hop's political impact, but share a fundamentally flawed set of assumptions that cause them to misunderstand the relationship between culture and politics.

McWhorter, noted policy wonk and author of "Losing the Race," pets hip-hop with one hand as he slaps it with the other. How can mere music - particularly music riven by such inner contradiction - be capable of true change? "Actually listen to a rap track, even by a conscious artist, and then think about the real world. How many among us really believe there is a meaningful connection between that rap and making people think in new ways - ways so new that the nation's fabric changes?" The answer is almost nobody. McWhorter assembles a paper tiger in order to repeatedly lunge at it, and then waits for our applause when he has vanquished the beast. It is not that "All About the Beat" is fundamentally mistaken; hip-hop is not a likely precursor of revolutionary change, and incremental, piecemeal efforts to improve the lives of African-Americans are often ignored in favor of pie-in-the-sky theorizing. It is just that in 2008, in the era of Soulja Boy, few would claim otherwise.

Please continue to Full Story

Love's Troubadours - Karma: Book One by Ananda Kiamsha Madelyn Leeke , a powerful new women's self-discovery novel, honors Afro-Latino culture, history, music, and dance; and promotes solidarity among African American and Afro-Latino communities.

Author Ananda Kiamsha Madelyn Leeke ’s debut novel, Love's Troubadours - Karma: Book One, pays tribute to the contributions made by Afro-Latinos to culture, history, music, and dance in the Americas. It features characters with Afro-Cuban, Afro-Mexican, and Afro-Peruvian roots. These characters offer rich dialogue peppered with references to Afro-Latino culture and history. They also work with and maintain positive relationships with African Americans that promote Black and Brown solidarity.

Love's Troubadours - Karma: Book One educates readers about Yanga, an African who ran away from his slave master in 1609 and founded the first free African township near Veracruz, Mexico. The novel gives readers an interesting history lesson about American-born African slaves who fled to Mexico in the mid 1800s. Readers also visit museums such as El Museo del Barrio in New York City and National Museum of Mexican Art (formerly known as the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum) in Chicago that exhibit Afro-Latino art. In addition, they have a chance to fall in love with the music of Afro-Cuban Jazz Musicians Mongo Santamaria and Omar Sosa, Afro-Puerto Rican Jazz Musician Willie Bobo, and Afro-Peruvian Singer Susana Baca. By the end of Love's Troubadours - Karma: Book One, readers may find themselves dancing Salsa just like the main character Karma Francois.

Love's Troubadours - Karma: Book One by Ananda Kiamsha Madelyn Leeke tells the story of Karma Francois, a thirtysomething California-born BoHo BAP (Bohemian Black American Princess) with Louisiana roots and urban debutante flair. The novel illustrates how a woman uses therapy, yoga, meditation, art, music, poetry, and support from family and friends to confront the effects of her poor life choices and embrace a spiritual journey of healing and love. It was published by iUniverse, Inc. and is available on www.amazon.com.

Please continue to Full Story

I Am A Navy Corpsman
by Mark A. Wright, HMC(SS) USN 

 

I am a navy corpsman. I possess the stamina and enthusiasm of youth and the wisdom and experience of an old man. I am 3 parts doctor, 1 part nurse, 2 parts marine, 1 part yeoman and 3 parts mom, yet I am 100% sailor. I am unemployable to the civilian world in my given profession yet have been the very life line for countless marines, soldiers and sailors since 1778. I have carried marines from the battle field ... and have ben carried reverently myself by marines who mourned my passing like that of a brother or sister.

I am young. I am old. brave, scared and scarred. my title has changed over the years: loblolly boy, surgeons stewart, pharmacist mate, hospital corpsman, IDC, yet with all the changes I am still simply know as "doc". I have celebrated peace; yet felt the sting of war on the seas, in jungles, in foreign cities, in Washington D.C. and on beaches of every shade of sand... white, tan, coral and black. I have raised hell on liberty; hope in the midst of battle .... and Old Glory on Iwo Jima. I have removed appendixes on submarines and limbs in the midst of battle and many other procedures far above and beyond what I am expected to do by the normal practice of medicine because it had to be done in order to save the life of a marine or sailor in battle or under the ice, far from a doctors care. I have ignored my own wounds to the point of death in order to stay at my station treating the wounded of my nations navy, marine corp, army and air force. I have the highest number of medal of honors of any corp in the Navy .....most of them presented to my wife, child or mother because I was already in heaven at the time. I am proud to know in my heart that every marine who has ever fought and every sailor who has gone to sea on ships owe their very lives to those they simply, yet respectfully know as "doc"

 

By Karen R. Long

Cleveland - Maya Angelou danced with Langston Hughes in Harlem, drank with James Baldwin in Paris, had her picture snapped in Ghana by Malcolm X. Six feet tall and mesmerizing, she had men crossing the room to call her the most beautiful woman on the planet, but few mistook her for arm candy.

 

Angelou turned 80 last month, unabashedly enjoying center stage at parties in four states, from an everybody-is-invited fete in Winston-Salem to an A-list gala in Palm Beach, Fla., hosted by surrogate daughter Oprah Winfrey. The decades have burnished Angelou's unique place on the American scene, cemented partly in Bill Clinton's decision to ask her to read an original poem for his 1993 inauguration.

Scholars describe Angelou as a Mother Figure and a Living Ancestor, while everyday readers still memorize and recite her words. She is reported to earn $43,000 each time she speaks.

In poems, film, plays and, most centrally, her six autobiographical books, Angelou's voice continues to casts its spell. "Caged Bird" has sold about 4 million copies and is third on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most challenged titles.

It has been parodied on "The Simpsons" ("I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings") and lionized in book clubs. It tells of the author's rape at age 7 by her mother's boyfriend, of his subsequent slaying and her decision to stop speaking for some five years.

Please continue to Full Story

By Thelma Boamah

Who needs a black, queer hero?

That was the question of the evening last Friday when two dozen playwrights, activists and scholars attended a discussion to address the black LGBT protagonist's place on the American stage at the Graduate Center for CUNY in Midtown. The discussion was cosponsored by Freedom Train Productions, an organization that promotes political theater written by up-and-coming black playwrights, and CUNY's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. The evening was moderated by Andre Lancaster, the artistic and managing director of FTP.

Playwright Aurin Squire said that the presence of black LGBT protagonists in his work was no coincidence.

Please continue to Full Story

BookExpo America, one of the largest book trade exhibits in the world, provides independent African American book publishers, self publishers, authors, Black Interest Imprints at major publishing houses, distributors, literary agents, publicists, librarians and bookstore owners exposure to more than eighty thousand book buyers and booksellers from across the globe. Organizers of the African American Pavilion at BookExpo America are finalizing plans for the event to take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA May 30 - June 1, 2008.

"The response by the exhibitors and the book publishing industry to the 2007 African American Pavilion at BookExpo America was tremendous and powerful," stated Pavilion co-founder Tony Rose. "The Pavilion hosted some of the giants in the African American Publishing Industry such as: Haki Madhubuti, Third World Press; Kassahun Checole, Africa World Press/Red Sea Press; Wade and Cheryl Hudson, Just Us Books; Wil Colom, Genesis Press; Zane, Strebor Books International/Simon and Schuster; Terrie Williams, The Stay Strong Foundation/Terrie Williams Agency; Carol Mackey, Black Expressions Book Club; Vickie Stringer, Triple Crown Publications; Harriette Cole, Harriette Cole Productions - Ebony Magazine; Max Rodriguez, The Harlem Book Fair / QBR The Black Book Review; and Ken Smikle, Black Issues Book Review."

BookExpo America, one of the largest book trade exhibits in the world provides independent African American book publishers, self publishers, authors, African American imprints at major publishing houses, distributors, literary agents, publicists, librarians, and bookstore owners with exposure to more than 80,000 book buyers and booksellers from across the world. With over 20,000 BEA attendees crossing up and down the African American Pavilion aisles, the buying and selling is tremendous, and the African American Pavilion provides our exhibitors the lowest discounted booth prices at the BookExpo America.

Please continue to Full Story

The American Negro Playwright Theatre Events and ANPT Board member Kimberley LaMarque Invite you to participate as a Paid Judge For the 2008 National Forensics Association Championship Hosted by Tennessee State University April 18-21, 2008

Tennessee State University's Forensics Program is honored to host the 2008 National Forensics Association Championship Tournament, held April 18-21, 2008. We need your help judging a few rounds of this prestigious event. There will be prepared speeches, dramatic performance pieces and Lincoln Douglas Debate. If you are available, please contact Kimberley LaMarque for More Information, Tournament Schedule, and Judges Registration Form. 615-963-7491 · klamarque@tnstate.edu

Please continue to Full Story

Sunday, July 20 – Saturday, July 26, 2008    American University, Washington, DC

Hurston/Wright Writers' Week is the nation's only multi-genre summer writer's workshop for writers of African descent with a tuition-free component for high school students. Since the first workshop in the summer of 1996, over 850 writers have attended the weeklong program of classes and presentations by publishers, agents, and writers.

The Week brings together Black writers from around the United States, as well as Black writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, who create a nurturing, safe space to discuss their work, its meaning, and unique aesthetics. Hurston/Wright Writers' Week is distinguished by the diversity of the writers it attracts: published, unpublished, college students, high school students, seniors, retirees, professionals - all chosen to participate in the Week on the strength of their writing.

Perhaps the highest accolade given to the workshop is the number of participants who have returned to their communities, and inspired by Hurston/Wright Writers' Week, have formed community workshops and support groups for Black writers.

Please continue to Full Story

By RAVI NESSMAN

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday, an aide said. He was 90.

 

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome for years, died at 1:30 a.m. in his adopted home of Sri Lanka after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

The 1968 story "2001: A Space Odyssey" — written simultaneously as a novel and screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick — was a frightening prophesy of artificial intelligence run amok.

One year after it made Clarke a household name in fiction, the scientist entered the homes of millions of Americans alongside Walter Cronkite anchoring television coverage of the Apollo mission to the moon.

Please continue to Full Story

The African-American Pavilion Heads to Los Angeles for Their 5th Record-Breaking Year

National (BlackNews.com) - BookExpo America, one of the largest book trade exhibits in the world, provides independent African American book publishers, self publishers, authors, Black Interest Imprints at major publishing houses, distributors, literary agents, publicists, librarians and bookstore owners exposure to more than eighty thousand book buyers and booksellers from across the globe. Organizers of the African American Pavilion at BookExpo America are finalizing plans for the event to take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA May 30 - June 1, 2008.

Now in its fifth year, the African American Pavilion at BEA is the marketplace for thousands of African American publishing industry professionals. Influential exhibitors and book buyers form a community of unprecedented strength. "The African American Pavilion is a growing presence at BEA," says exhibitor C. Sunny Martin , CEO and Founder, Who's Who Publishing and the 2007 African American Pavilion at BEA "Independent African American Publisher of Note." "There will be great opportunities to learn, share, educate, sell and network and it's making black book history a vital, visible part of the 107-year history of BookExpo America/American Booksellers Association."

Please continue to Full Story

A belatedly published roman a clef about the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance.

By Alice Randall,

Gentleman Jigger
A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance
Da Capo Press: 332 pp., $18 paper

Richard Bruce Nugent's novel "Gentleman Jigger" is a strange cocktail of glamour and dirt that goes down easy, quickly intoxicates and leaves a pungent taste. It may just give you a hangover. But anyone who has ever lamented that he or she was born too late to spend an evening at Georgia Douglas Johnson's legendary Washington, D.C., salon frequented by black writers, artists and politicians, or to spend any hour at 267 W. 136th St. "when Harlem was in vogue," should rush to risk the head pounding.

Cracking "Gentleman Jigger," however, is a bit like opening a door to a party full of very interesting, sometimes dangerous, sometimes dazzling people who all know one another -- but don't know, and perhaps don't want to know, you. The experience is also akin to sitting beside a bold-living, wild-loving, deliciously indiscreet man of fine lineage willing to regale you with juicy gossip from the world of art and letters and tender but explicit favored incidents in his sexual history, all the while reeling off the names of dozens of books you might want to poke into and why, and pausing to provide a primer of social etiquette among certain elements of black bohemia before tutoring you on how to capture the un-capturable man.

Please continue to Full Story

The March Other Countries Monthly Writing Workshop will be on:

Date & Time: Saturday, March 8th from 5:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m. Location: Room 205 of the LGBT Community Services Center, 208 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011

If you are interested in presenting work: please e-mail Kevin to confirm at kevmcgr@pipeline.com bring 8-10 copies of your work. (After the workshop, for those who are interested, we will have dinner at Spain on 13th between 6th and 7th Avenues). Below are guidelines for the workshop.

Other Countries Writing Workshop Discussion/Critique Guidelines

The Other Countries Writing Workshop is a peer-facilitated workshop. In order to ensure a supportive atmosphere and to encourage constructive criticism of work please keep the following in mind:

• Before reading their work, writers should introduce it by telling about the FAP (Focus, Audience, and Purpose) for the piece as well as its genre. They should think of specific questions they want answered by the workshop, e.g. “Is this ready for submission to literary journals?” “Does this first chapter pull you into my novel’s story?” “Does this character seem too cardboard or cliché?”

• The moderator will facilitate the discussion/critique of the work

• Participants should:

avoid cross talk between other participants while a comment is being made; address both positives and negatives in the work; avoid extraneous “amen-ing” (repeating the comments) of previous speakers; avoid personal commentary of the writer and others; provide suggestions for further development of the work, etc.

MBG - Men Who are Black and Happen to be Gay
by author/owner Leo Shelton.

“A hilarious and fun read with a punch” is how it is being described…. MBG is a humorous look at stereotypes, those people put on themselves, and that sometimes culminate from those we put on others. They often become unwritten rules, even lifestyles or those ever-funny true-isms for how we live, love and laugh at and with each other.

MBG takes you through some of the unwritten rules, and even downright stereotypes that define how some black men look at themselves and each other, how they laugh at, even mock or feed into the stereotypes or simply change the rules to define who they are, sometimes proudly, sometimes ridiculously and sometimes cleverly, in terms of dating, being down-low, on grooming, living, even sex.

Leo Shelton is an author, poet, writer, educator, scholar, and a self-proclaimed life long learner and student of life. An urban renaissance, influenced by the classic works of artists and legends as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes and Marlon Riggs, he also credits influences such as Robert Hayden, Richard Wright, Walt Whitman, and Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as many of the artists today in music, spoken word, and creative expressions like Terrance Hayes, Tim’m West, Common and Floetry, for helping him to find his voice and place in writing. And this one goes outside of the poetry and prose of RHYTHMS – Poetry and Muse and SOUL-FULL – Poetry that introduced many readers to his writing talent and abilities.

By Robert Dorit

The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.
Helen Epstein. xxv + 326 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. $26.

The development of effective antiretrovirals has transformed AIDS into two diseases—one for the rich and quite a different one for the poor. In the developed world, people infected with HIV who have access to health care can now think of their illness as a chronic condition with which they may live for decades, and the incidence (the number of new cases diagnosed each year) has declined significantly. By contrast, in much of the developing world HIV infection is still largely a near-term death sentence, and the far greater incidence is only just beginning to level off.

Why have we not yet prevailed over HIV? Part of the answer is to be found in the biology of the virus, which evolves quickly, hijacks and eventually destroys the host's immune system, and depends on the most powerful of human urges—sex—for its transmission.

But the AIDS pandemic has been a formidable adversary for other reasons as well. As Helen Epstein makes clear in The Invisible Cure, the fight against AIDS in Africa, where nearly 70 percent of the world's HIV patients live, has been a chronicle of missed opportunities, well-intentioned fiascos, greed and folly.

Epstein, a trained scientist who is now a journalist eager to make a difference in the lives of others, has spent many years in the AIDS trenches. With clarity and precision, she describes the human dimensions of the crisis in Africa, casting a cool and analytical eye on the way the world has responded. The book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the pandemic by focusing on the many ways in which foreign aid, foreign experts and unresponsive Western governments have collided with long-standing traditions and emerging dysfunctions of the African continent.

Please continue to Full Story

NEW YORK - Terry McMillan has been honored with a lifetime achievement award from Essence magazine for her best-selling, irreverent novels about the everyday struggles of modern American black women.

"No single writer today has documented the African-American experience from a contemporary black women's point of view like Terry McMillan," said Patrik Henry Bass, a senior editor at Essence for books and art.

McMillan's best-known books are "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and "Waiting to Exhale." Both were made into movies.

McMillan, 56, has a long history with Essence. As a journalism student at the University of California at Berkeley, McMillan won an Essence essay contest in 1974 for a piece on black male-female relationships.

The award-winning author and nominees in eight other literary categories were nominated by the editors of Essence. Afterward, a panel of experts in the black publishing field selected the winners.

McMillan and the other winners were to attend the Essence Literary Awards ceremony Thursday evening.

Source link

By Reyhan Harmanci

The research for LaShonda Barnett's book "I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft" was exhaustive, but Barnett, a Sarah Lawrence College writing professor, took her time.

For a two-book set, the first of which is "I Got Thunder," Barnett interviewed 40 of her favorite female African American singer-songwriters, including Abbey Lincoln, Brenda Russell, Chaka Kahn, Dianne Reeves, Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Nona Hendryx, Odetta, Shemekia Copeland, Shirley Caesar, Toshi Reagon and others.

"Because I really love these women, I know their music like the back of my hand," Barnett says. "I've been researching for this book for the past 20 years, listening to these songs over and over again."

LaShonda Barnett

But the real impetus for the book came more recently, when Barnett went searching for a book about the creative processes of some of her favorite artists. It didn't exist. "So often when we think of creative woman singers, particularly African American women, we tend to negate the intellectual aspects of their work. We think that they're born with a gift - and I'm not negating that fact, that they are born with gifts - but there's a lot of work that precedes the moment she steps up to the mike."

Barnett says that she expected to have trouble securing interviews with her subjects, but her focus on the professional, not necessarily the personal, must have been refreshing, because everyone she asked agreed to talk. Despite that, Barnett says that more than one of her subjects broke down during the interview. The emotion came from discussing what went into individual songs.

"I was blown away that so many women were called to music before the age of 10. That was a stunning similarity, despite genres.

Please continue to Full Story

The sopmore release, a follow-up to RHYTHMS - Poetry and Muse, SOUL-FULL is a love affair of two poets, through spritual connections...a love affair of words, deep, articulate and intense. An emotionally charged dialogue, that resonates both deep and true through the movements of words.

More details at Tugson Press