This morning the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced this year’s nominees for the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards. Among them were first-time nominee Kerry Washington for her leading role in ABC’s Scandal. According to ShadowAndAct, this is the first nomination for an African-American woman in a leading role since Cicely Tyson’s nod for Sweet Justice in the 1994-1995 awards season.
Don Cheadle was similarly honored (his sixth nod altogether) for Showtime’s House of Lies and four-time Emmy winner Alfre Woodard was recognized for her supporting turn in Lifetime’s remake of Steel Magnolias.
Additionally, recently-elected Director’s Guild President Paris Barclay was nominated for his direction of the “Diva” episode of Fox’s Glee, and The Science Channel’s Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman was nominated for Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Series.
The winners will be announced during the awards ceremony televised live by CBS on September 22, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. ET /5:00 p.m. PT from the Nokia Theatre/L.A. LIVE in Los Angeles.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
Posts published in “Awards/Honors”
If Rhys Powell gets his way, every student in America will be eating freshly prepared, nutritious meals and snacks – and his company, Harlem-based Red Rabbit, will be doing a lot of the serving. Red Rabbit’s already making some big leaps in that direction. Launched in 2005, Powell’s startup is quickly becoming a force in the healthy food for kids biz. This coming school year, Red Rabbit will be preparing and delivering 20,000 meals a day to students in more than 100 private and charter schools in the New York area.
That means many children from low-income communities will be munching on healthy items like mango yogurt parfaits and fresh fish, instead of chicken nuggets and frozen pizza. Sales at Red Rabbit are expected to double in the 2013 school year to $10 million. Two years ago, the company moved to a 10,000 square-foot facility at 121st St. and Park Ave., where Powell, 33, employs 130 workers, many of them Harlem residents.
Those kind of strides have put Powell in the spotlight: On Monday the city is set to name Red Rabbit the Manhattan Small Business of the Year in its annual Neighborhood Achievement Awards. “We are a young, entrepreneurial company that is trying to improve the food system in America, one community at a time,” Powell said during an interview at his Harlem offices.
Those kind of strides have put Powell in the spotlight: On Monday the city is set to name Red Rabbit the Manhattan Small Business of the Year in its annual Neighborhood Achievement Awards. “We are a young, entrepreneurial company that is trying to improve the food system in America, one community at a time,” Powell said during an interview at his Harlem offices.
Thessalonika Arzu-Embry and her mother, Wonder Embry, get up at five in the morning most weekdays to go to school together. Unlike most 14-year-olds, however, Thessalonika isn’t off early in the morning to the local high school. She’s going to Chicago State University.
Thessalonika is putting the finishing touches on a college career that started three years ago at College of Lake County and will end next month with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Chicago State. “My college experience is a traditional college experience for me — it is just that I have completed it faster,” Thessalonika said. “I am very excited about joining others in having the opportunity to contribute to society in a significant way.”
After their early wake-up, Thessalonika and her mom pray and work on Bible studies, then work out at a local fitness center before starting their hour-and-a-half commute from their home at the Great Lakes Naval Station near North Chicago to Chicago State, located on the city’s South Side. Wonder Embry is a classmate of sorts at Chicago State, where she’s a graduate student in clinical psychology.
During the commute, Wonder and Thessalonika study theory together and chat about their homework assignments. Thessalonika said her mother keeps her motivated. “My mother is a strong inspiration to my success. She is a veteran of the United States Navy, and when she finished her tour, she home-schooled my brother and I,” Thessalonika said. Thessalonika’s mother said that for her part, she was just doing right by her daughter. “The parents are the most influential force in their own children’s lives, and they have the power to influence them to do good and to go forward,” Wonder Embry said.
Thessalonika was home-schooled until she was 8. At age 11, after receiving the equivalent of a high school diploma through her home schooling, she passed an entrance exam to attend College of Lake County and enrolled to study psychology. She said she chose college from such a young age because she loves studying and has an interest in psychology that goes far beyond just material knowledge. One of her ultimate goals is to help people through a clinic she hopes to establish with her mother and her brother, Jeremy.
Nas has found a new home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University’s W.E.B Du Bois Institute and Hip-Hop Archive announced the creation of the Nasir Jones Fellowship. The fellowship named after the rapper who is known for his philosophical bars, will allow scholars and artists to use their education through a creative outlet. The Nasir Jones Fellowship key purpose is based on the motto: Education is real power.
The Hip-Hop Archive press release states the mission:
“To seek projects from scholars and artists that build on the rich and complex hip-hop tradition; to respect that tradition through historically grounded and contextualized critical insights; and most importantly, to represent one’s creative and/or intellectually rigorous contribution to hip-hop and the discourse through personal and academic projects.”
The fellowship will cover the works of Nas and other prolific hip-hop artists who contributed monumental work to the genre. Recipients of The Nasir Jones Fellowship will be selected by Harvard faculty.
The MC who received the privilege of his own fellowship at the Ivy League states:
“In my roller coaster of a life I’ve endured good and bad for sure, and I’ve truly been blessed to have achieved so much through art in my short life thus far. But I am immensely over-the-top excited about the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship at Harvard. From Queens, NY to true cultural academia. My hopes are that greed for knowledge, art, self-determination and expression go a long way. It is a true honor to have my name attached to so much hard work, alongside great names like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois and to such a prestigious and historical institution, and all in the name of the music I grew to be a part of.”
Before forming his own fellowship, Nas has helped Grammy-award winning music producer 9th Wonder with his own academic research project called These Are The Breaks. The research was based on compiling original samples from hip-hop albums that were permanently archived in the Harvard Library; Nas’s Illimatic was a part of the research. 9th Wonder’s research project and journey to Harvard has become a documentary called, The Harvard Fellow.
article by Lauren R.D. Fox via madamenoire.com
A former foster child from the south side of Chicago has turned entrepreneur, and been recognized at the White House for his inspiring work. Derrius Quarles, who is only 22 years old, is best known for winning more than $1 million in financial-aid to attend the prestigious Morehouse College. He was a recipient of the Daily Point of Light Award in June 2013 for his commitment to help academically gifted yet economically disadvantaged students overcome financial barriers to higher education.
“I feel honored and humbled to be recognized by the White House as a Daily Point of Light awardee,” said Quarles. “I have been recognized for the work I have done with the Million Dollar Scholar, which has advanced economic access to higher education for youth in inner cities across the United States.” The Million Dollar Scholar initiative has assisted more than 10,000 high school students online and helped students receive more than $950,000 in scholarships and grants.
In fact, Quarles’s drive to see other young people succeed is deeply personal. His father was murdered in Chicago when he was just 4 years old. One year later, he was taken from his mother’s custody and placed in foster care. It was only when he entered high school that he made a conscious decision to seize opportunities to move on with his life.
One of the most important vinyl record collections in the history of hip-hop will be on display to the public when archivists sort, organize and even play music from the crates of DJ Afrika Bambaataa – the godfather of hip-hop culture and an instrumental figure in the rise of electro funk. Gavin Brown’s enterprise and Johan Kugelberg/Boo-Hooray Gallery, together with Afrika Bambaataa, the Universal Zulu Nation and Cornell University Library are organizing the records for the Afrika Bambaataa Master of Records vinyl archive, which will permanently live at Cornell University’s Hip Hop Collection in fall 2013.
From July 11 through Aug. 10, Kugelberg and his team will be organizing, cataloguing and documenting Afrika Bambaataa’s peerless vinyl collection on business days between noon and 5 p.m. at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, Manhattan. Visitors are encouraged to stop by, hear some great music and see how the cultural artifacts of this important strand of American history are preserved.
Please join the Afrika Bambaataa vinyl archive mailing list at afrikab@gavinbrown.biz and follow Gavin Brown’s enterprise on Facebook and Twitter for announcements of visiting DJs playing selections from the archive during the sort. Originally from the South Bronx, Afrika Bambaataa is among the most influential American DJs. He is considered the godfather of hip-hop culture and was instrumental in the rise of electro funk and break-beat deejaying beginning in the 1980s.
Compton, Calif. has elected Aja Brown as its newest mayor. The 31-year-old urban planner beat former mayor Omar Bradley in a runoff mayoral election. She’s the youngest mayor in Compton’s history and is determined to make progress in the city. “I believe the people of Compton are ready for change,” she said after being elected in June. “They’ve spoken. Their voice has clearly been heard that they don’t want to go backward. They want to go forward.”
The University of Southern California alumna is not taking her new position lightly. Her top priorities include reducing crime, balancing the budget and improving Compton’s image. In a recent interview she addressed her priorities as follows:
“I think the City of Compton has suffered for quite some time from the lack of innovative policies, really collaborative efforts with the federal, state and regional elected officials and government agencies. Compton has been on an island fiscally so I look forward to really collaborating in order to move our visions forward: to go back to basics, to implement strategic plans, capital improvements plans that really lay out the infrastructure improvements in our community. My heart is really in building coalitions. The city of Compton has over 200 churches, 100 non-profits, small business communities and really large corporations and so we have an opportunity to really bridge the gap between those sectors and be able to provide a higher level of service to our residents.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Describing them as teachers, President Barack Obama said Wednesday that two dozen recipients of national medals for contributions to the arts and humanities have created works that will last for American life.
At a White House ceremony, Obama awarded medals to 23 singers, dancers, poets, producers, playwrights, scholars and others, and one performing arts organization. As applause and cheers rippled across the stately East Room, Obama joked that the audience was doing so “Because I’ve bought their books, I’ve seen their movies, I buy their records. So we’re major contributors here.”
Turning more serious, he praised the medal recipients for using their talents “To open up minds and nourish souls, and help us understand what it means to be human, and what it means to be an American.” “We celebrate people like our honorees here today not just because of their talent, but because they create something new. They create a new space and that becomes a lasting contribution to American life,” Obama said.
Among those receiving a National Medal of Arts are Herb Alpert, of Malibu, Calif., the musician behind the Tijuana Brass phenomenon and co-founder of A&M records; filmmaker George Lucas, of San Anselmo, Calif., and the Washington Performing Arts Society, of Washington, D.C.
Recipients of the National Humanities Medal include author Joan Didion, sportswriter Frank Deford and Robert B. Silvers, editor and co-founder of The New York Review of Books. All three are from New York.
Natasha Trethewey, the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, was reappointed to another term as Poet Laureate of the United States. She is also serving a four-year term as the poet laureate of the state of Mississippi.
James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, stated, “The Library and the country are fortunate Natasha Trethewey will continue her work as Poet Laureate. Natasha’s first term was a resounding success, and we could not be more thrilled with her plans for the coming year.”
Professor Trethewey is the author of four collections of poetry. Her collection, Native Guard, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. Her fourth collection, Thrall, was published late last year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is also the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press, 2010).
A native of Gulfport, Mississippi, Professor Trethewey is a graduate of the University of Georgia. She holds a master’s degree from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
article via jbhe.com
TV director Paris Barclay (Sons of Anarchy, Glee, House) has been elected president of the Directors Guild of America for a two-year term, succeeding Taylor Hackford (Ray, Officer and a Gentleman) . Barclay was selected at the DGA’s convention on Saturday at DGA headquarters in Los Angeles. He’s the first African-American to serve as DGA president.
“I got surprisingly emotional about it when I was giving my acceptance speech,” Barclay told Variety. Hackford announced earlier this year that he would not seek a third term in accordance with the DGA tradition of presidents only serving two terms. The well-liked Barclay has served eight years as First VP and six years as Third VP.
Barclay also told Variety that other DGA members such as Steven Soderbergh and former president Michael Apted have been urging him in recent years to consider becoming president. “As time went on, I began hearing that from more and more people,” he added.
Apted made the nomination Saturday and Soderberg seconded it.
Barclay asserted that he will maintain the tradition of the DGA president being a working director — in his case as the executive producer of the sixth season of “Sons of Anarchy.” Once that season’s shooting is completed, he plans to continue directing episodes of other series that interest him along with a feature film.