Tugson Press is proud to announce the release of its first publication, RHYTHMS, a book of poetry published by Tugson Press and author/owner Leo Shelton.

He writes about the realistic rhythms of life, lust, love and loss. He boldly carries the reader on a journey of emotions, through reflections, insights, and a dance, that is both uniquely his but shared by the reader-any reader.

Musa Okwonga talked his mother into letting him apply for Eton, then went on to become a lawyer, a football fan, a performance poet and, as Sarah Maslin Nir learns, a crusader for the spoken word

MUSA OKWONGA COULD BE forgiven for wishing that he wasn’t a poet. He’s athletically built, handsome, the product of a one-parent home and complete with a rags-to-riches background. Many lyrically inclined young black men who fit his description slot into the socially expected role of “rapper”. Had he done so, he would have spared himself considerable grief from detractors who say he is wasting his time trying to revive the art of performance poetry. To hear Okwonga tell it, he had no choice; being a poet is to him as involuntary as skin colour, or homosexuality.

by Mel Cooke

After a weekend of gloomy skies and heavy showers, the sun came out just in time for a poetry special to be filmed at Boone Hall Oasis, Stony Hill, St. Andrew on Tuesday.

And just as those involved in the project, to be aired on BET J, are taking advantage of the window of good weather, they also had to seize the opportunity to get the programme done in time for it to be aired as scheduled.

By Patrick Tagbo Oguejiofor
Lagos

IT has now been established beyond all reasonable doubts by critics all over the world that Christopher Okigbo (1923-67) is Africa's greatest poet writing in the English language and one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. First, Labyrinths, his major collection of poems was rated as one of the best 100 books of the last one hundred years. Secondly, 3 major works establish this claim beyond any doubt. First among these critical works is that of the late Professor Sunday Anozie, Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric, 1972, Dubem Okafor's Dance of Death: Nigeria's History and Christopher Okigbo's Poetry. Then there is the collection of scholarly studies of his work, Critical Perspectives on the Poetry of Christopher Okigbo, ed. Donatus Nwoga.

In the candle and lava-lamp glow of a side room at the Kamikaze, Tom Noy works the mic like a hip-hop game show host. He starts with a poem, and then he chats the crowd up to the point where he can say "word" and they all shout back "word," and when he says "aaaiyt," they all say "aaaiyt." They've come to hear poetry and compete with it, and there's no stage fright in sight. About 50 people all paid $5 at the door. Noy is the slam master. He lays down the rules, and his voice rolls like it's coming from the radio, or a holy pulpit. A guy named Sanchez, whom Noy calls Vanna Black, strolls comically across the stage with a placard advising the crowd to put cell phones on vibrate. The poets don't want any ring-tone interruptions. And when Noy says the evening is brought to them by "Chief Rocka Entertainment," the crowd helps punctuate with an "Oooooooop! Oooooooop!"

By Mariama Diallo Crandall
Washington,DC

Book reviewers are greeting warmly a new book on Africa by African-American journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. The book is called "New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance." One reviewer called it "the only decent introduction to Africa today," while another says it’s "an excellent overview of Africa’s current progressive trend." VOA's Mariama Diallo Crandall caught up with Charlayne Hunter-Gault and has this report.

by ABDUL-JABBAR OMALE

Have you seen Nduka Otiono?" "No I haven’t, I'm sorry." "When you see him, tell him I am angry with him.’(I think Nduka; her host, had abandoned her temporarily).’ She moved her simply enthralling personality along then. And I was left standing there. Staring at her and her tall very white gypsy arrayed female friend, Sandra, who had accompanied her on this homecoming fiesta to Nigeria, wishing she was mine to keep forever and a day! Stupid me! I would discover later upon more camaraderie and closer inspection that she was older than my immediate elder sister, Mariam, and of course, the glaring differences of our worlds and feel more frustratingly stupid! This was at the ANA Convention in Makurdi 2002, the lingering moments of the last days of my youth, bachelorhood, vagabond and miscellaneous desires - and how I met the Okigbo heiress - Obiageli Ibrahimat Okigbo.

By Julianne Schultz

In 1991, Barack Obama was invited by a leading New York publisher to write a book after he hit the news following his election as the first African-American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, the student law journal that has marked the beginning of many great careers.

The publisher's modest advance allowed him to set aside six months after he graduated to write. The book he planned ticked all the boxes of the political and intellectual map framing the discussion of race in the US at the time. There would be chapters on affirmative action, community, organising, Afro-centrism and public life.

The book he actually wrote is something quite different. All these topics are explored but in a way that puts flesh on the bones of a young man who, by 30, was wiser than many twice his age. Unlike the dry treatise he planned, it is also a joy to read.

By James Gibbons

Percival Everett has made a career out of flouting expectations. A bold and prolific novelist, he has forged a nervy, caustic body of work that defies easy categorization. His insistence on aesthetic freedom has not been without its costs. In the clever satire "Erasure" (2001), he outlined the bleak predicament of the African American writer who, like Everett himself, chooses to write something other than stereotypically "black" literature. The despairing novelist ghostwrites a spoof of inner-city fiction called "Ma Pafology" and, to his sad bewilderment, is lionized by publishers, critics and the public, none of whom get the joke.

"I am gay, I am the South -- Miss South," proclaimed a proud Patrick Johnson, impersonating a man he once interviewed in Atlanta named Duncan.

Johnson, author of the forthcoming book Sweet Tea and director of graduate studies in the performance studies department at Northwestern University, performed the oral histories of six men featured in his book in front of a packed Union Theatre on Wednesday night.

The book dispels myths about what it might be like to be black and gay in the South, such as the perception that gay men aren't welcome, Johnson said.

The book is a poetic biographical journey from childhood to womanhood. Azaan feels that Spirit used her as a tool to share these words, so that the world would embrace and love all unconditionally.

This book is emotionally charged from beginning to end with pain, love, passion, and triumph! This book gives voice to a collection of life’s stories, some through a child’s eyes!

The poems express many things people feel or think, but don’t have the courage to say. The book is a vivid look into society and the world as a whole.

In The Midst of My Blackness I know I come from a tribe of Queens. Strong women, teachers and warriors. I was told the stories of my mothers before me living to die. Freezing and sick in the stomach of a ship. Dehumanized by a whip and chains. Sacrificed life for the wealth of someone else. Blood of my mothers dripped in vain. Misunderstood arthritis-ridden knuckles. Losing count of yellow ape babies stolen at dawn. Starring at the noose from the porch, While shadows run from the hoods of the night.

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Azaan is a nationally syndicated journalist, poet, and photographer. She is the former Editor of SBC and GBF Magazines. Currently she is the Creative Director of the new STUD Magazine. Azaan has also written for numerous publications, and has two published books. Azaan is currently part of the Virgin Moon Entertainment Production team, an independent film and television company. Virgin Moon’s most recent film success is My Nappy Roots, a documentary about the African Diaspora’s relationship and spirituality with their hair. Azaan has shared her amazing poetry at several Underground exhibits at the prestigious Getty Museum. Azaan uses her writing as tools to educate, empower, and uplift all people. Azaan believes through knowledge and understanding there is no force that can oppress us.

By Zack Rosen

Rodney Lofton begins his memoir, “The Day I Stopped Being Pretty,” in the bleakest of all literary locations: rock bottom. After a failed suicide attempt, he ends up dry-heaving in an emergency room, and his identity as a gay, HIV-positive black man becomes the lynchpin of his journey into and out of despair.

As with many gay men, Lofton’s relationship with his father was a tumultuous one. His delicate physical attributes, evidenced since childhood, were a sticking point between father and son, especially when a woman the father was dating called his young son “pretty.” The tension between the two only increased as Lofton acknowledged his gay sexual orientation.

“We never had the best relationship when it came to my sexuality,” Lofton says about his father. “It was like clockwork. The same way I go quarterly to get my viral load checked, my dad would ask me every three months if I had met a nice girl. This happened until the last time I saw him in July of 2003. “

By David Ninh

Photographer David Yellen (Time, Life and People) and writer Johanna Lenander (I.D., Surface and The New York Times' T) explore the jaw-dropping outrageousness and artistic coiffures from African-American hair trade shows in a new book called Hair Wars.

The arresting images in this slick photo book, which is sure to brighten any coffee table, highlight extravagant, fantasy hairdos from professional hairstylists who participate in "hair entertainment" shows around the country. Armed with limitless imagination, these stylists work with loads of human-hair pieces, pounds of glitter and lots of colorful makeup, and they incorporate unusual props (everything from fishbowls to barbecue grills and Bibles) into those hair-raising styles.

Just wait, we're betting a reality show will get cooked up about these over-the- top competitions.

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Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett

By Erin Aubry Kaplan

WHEN I was in first grade, I wrote in an assignment that I wanted to be "a poetess like Phillis Wheatley" when I grew up. I'd seen only one drawing of Phillis Wheatley, but it made an impression -- a black woman in a frilly cap, quill pen poised in one hand, chin in the other. She was prim, serious, purposeful. In the mid-1700s, she'd somehow gone from being a slave to being a poet, who mastered complicated forms of poetry that had been the exclusive domain of the white folks who once owned her. This felt like the height of heroism to me, and I resolved to become a Phillis Wheatley in my own time. I would be a New Negro.

Wheatley lived long before the official age of the New Negro, a long-standing trope that came into vogue in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, when a critical mass of black writers based in New York broadened the narrow definitions of black literature and black artistry in general. But the concept goes as far back as Wheatley; slavery's dehumanizing legacy demanded a New Negro, who would literally throw off the chains of history to become something different, as Wheatley had. Of course, in her time, Wheatley was seen as an "exceptional" Negro, not the vanguard of a new one.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.