Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Poetry”

R.I.P. Acclaimed Author and Activist, Dr. Maya Angelou

By goodblacknews on May 28, 2014

best-Maya-Angelou-Quotes-sayings-wise-people

Maya Angelou, acclaimed author, poet, professor and civil rights activist, has died at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was 86.  Angelou was found by her caretaker this morning, Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines confirmed.

Angelou was set to be honored with the “Beacon of Life Award” at the 2014 Major League Baseball Beacon Award Luncheon on May 30 in Houston, but recently cancelled due to  health problems.  She is survived by her son, author Gus Johnson.

Angelou had a prolific career, published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization. She has also been an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs.

Since 1982, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.

In 2011, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.  To learn more about her life and career, click here.

article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson; @lakinhutcherson

Poet Raliq Bashard Teams with Fox Sports to Offer Moving Spoken-Word Sports Tribute to Black History Month (VIDEO)

By goodblacknews on February 28, 2014

http://youtu.be/-J8F61MdbUI
Screen Shot 2014-02-28 at 4.51.06 PMWith Black History Month winding down, Fox Sports joined forces with poet Raliq Bashard for a sports-centric tribute to the legends who paved the way for today’s athletes. Check out the video above, put together by Fox and their partners at Relevant 24.  To see the full written text of Bashard’s inspiring spoken-word testimonial, as well as specific stories about black sports figures such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Vonetta Flowers, Larry Doby and Wilma Rudolph, click here.
Review by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

Herbie Hancock Named Harvard’s 2014 Norton Professor of Poetry

By goodblacknews on January 15, 2014
Jazz Luminary Herbie Hancock (Photograph by Guillaume Laurent/Wikipedia)
World-renowned jazz musician and composer Herbie Hancock has been named Harvard University’s 2014 Norton Professor of Poetry.  Hancock will give six lectures this spring on topics that include “The Wisdom of Miles Davis,” “Breaking the Rules,” “Cultural Diplomacy and the Voice Of Freedom,” and “Innovation and New Technologies.”
“It is a great privilege to welcome Herbie Hancock as the Norton Professor,” said Homi Bhabha, Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, which is hosting the lectures. “His unsurpassed contribution to the history of music has revolutionized our understanding of the ways in which the arts transform our civic consciousness and our spiritual aspirations. It would be no exaggeration to say that he has defined cultural innovation in each decade of the last half-century.”
Born on April 12, 1940, in Chicago, Hancock grew up in a family that wasn’t particularly musical, according to Biography.com. At the age of seven he began studying European classical music, which continues to influence both his playing and composing. At the same time, he was influenced by jazz pianists like George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, and Erroll Garner. As a young teenager, he was playing Mozart with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As a member of the Miles Davis Quintet (which he joined in 1963), Hancock performed on dozens of albums and established a reputation as an outstanding composer who explored genres outside traditional jazz, ranging from fusion to R&B to hip-hop.
Hancock has also provided scores for a number of TV and film projects, including Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert cartoon series and an accompanying album, as well as for the movies Death Wish (1974), A Soldier’s Story (1984), and Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986). He won an Academy Award for the score to ‘Round Midnight (1986); his other honors include 14 Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year for River: The Joni Letters.

R.I.P. Poet and Activist Amiri Baraka

By goodblacknews on January 9, 2014
Portrait of American writer Amiri Baraka, USA, 17th March 2013. (Photo by Mick Gold/Redferns)
Portrait of American writer Amiri Baraka, USA, 17th March 2013. (Photo by Mick Gold/Redferns)

Amiri Baraka, the militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture, has died. He was 79.  His booking agent, Celeste Bateman, told The Associated Press that Baraka, who had been hospitalized since last month, died Thursday at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
Perhaps no writer of the 1960s and ’70s was more radical or polarizing than Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), and no one did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts. He inspired at least one generation of poets, playwrights and musicians, and his immersion in spoken word traditions and raw street language anticipated rap, hip-hop and slam poetry. The FBI feared him to the point of flattery, identifying Baraka as “the person who will probably emerge as the leader of the Pan-African movement in the United States.”
Baraka transformed from the rare black to join the Beat caravan of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to leader of the Black Arts Movement, an ally of the Black Power movement that rejected the liberal optimism of the early ’60s and intensified a divide over how and whether the black artist should take on social issues. Scorning art for art’s sake and the pursuit of black-white unity, Barak was part of a philosophy that called for the teaching of black art and history and producing works that bluntly called for revolution.
“We want ‘poems that kill,’” Baraka wrote in his landmark “Black Art,” a manifesto published in 1965, the year he helped found the Black Arts Movement. “Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”

Maya Angelou Accepts Mailer Center Lifetime Achievement Award

By goodblacknews on October 18, 2013
Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Maya Angelou poses for photographs during the fifth annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at the New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Maya Angelou poses for photographs during the fifth annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at the New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Her body weak, her voice rich and strong, Maya Angelou sang, lectured and reminisced as she accepted a lifetime achievement award Thursday night from the Norman Mailer Center.  The 85-year-old author, poet, dancer and actress was honored during a benefit gala at the New York Public Library, the annual gathering organized by the Mailer Center and writers colony . Seated in a wheelchair, she was a vivid presence in dark glasses and a sparkling black dress as she marveled that a girl from a segregated Arkansas village could grow up to become a literary star.

“Imagine it,” she said, “a town so prejudiced black people couldn’t even eat vanilla ice cream.” Angelou was introduced by her former editor at Random House, Robert Loomis, and she praised him for talking her into writing her breakthrough memoir, the million-selling I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The key was suggesting to her that the book might be too hard to write.

The people who knew her best, she explained, understood that “if you want to get Maya Angelou to do so something, tell her she can’t.”  Angelou, a longtime resident of North Carolina, will be back in Manhattan next month to collect an honorary National Book Award medal.

Maya Angelou To Receive Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Writing

By goodblacknews on September 30, 2013

mailer prize

NEW YORK — Maya Angelou is receiving another honorary prize for writing.  The Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony announced Thursday that Angelou will be given a lifetime achievement award at a benefit gala Oct. 17. Earlier this month, the National Book Foundation announced that the 85-year-old Angelou would be given an honorary National Book Award, her first major literary prize.
The Mailer Center will also give a distinguished writing prize to Junot Diaz and an award for the best emerging journalist to the late Michael Hastings. Hastings was killed in an auto accident in June at age 33. He’s best known for a Rolling Stone article that led to the resignation of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
article via huffingtonpost.com

Maya Angelou to Receive Honorary Book Award

By goodblacknews on September 5, 2013

Dr. Maya Angelou poses at the the Special Recognition Event for Dr. Maya Angelou � The Michael Jackson Tribute Portrait at Dr. Angelou's home June 21, 2010 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (Photo by Ken Charnock/Getty Images)
Dr. Maya Angelou poses at the the Special Recognition Event for Dr. Maya Angelou The Michael Jackson Tribute Portrait at Dr. Angelou’s home June 21, 2010 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (Photo by Ken Charnock/Getty Images)

The book world is finally honoring Maya Angelou.

The poet and author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will be this year’s recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community, the National Book Foundation announced today. It is the first major literary prize for the 85-year-old Angelou, who has been celebrated everywhere from the Grammy Awards to the White House. She has received three Grammys for best spoken word album, a National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.

Speaking by telephone with The Associated Press, Angelou said she couldn’t wait to be in the same room as “some very big names in the literary world” and that the Literarian prize made her feel that she was “picking in high cotton.”

“Dr. Angelou’s body of work transcends the words on the page,” the book foundation’s executive director, Harold Augenbraum, said in a statement. “She has been on the front lines of history and the fight for social justice and decade after decade remains a symbol of the redemptive power of literature in the contemporary world.”

Natasha Trethewey Appointed to a Second Term as Poet Laureate of the United States

By goodblacknews on July 3, 2013

Natasha TretheweyNatasha 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

Walter Mosley and Countee Cullen to Be Inducted Into the NY State Writers Hall of Fame

By goodblacknews on April 27, 2013

Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen

Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley

On June 4, the New York State Writers Hall of Fame will induct eight outstanding authors – Walter Mosley, Countee Cullen, Maurice Sendak, Alice McDermott, Miguel Pinero, James Fenimore Cooper, Calvin Trillin and  Marilyn Hacker.   Mosley is best known for his Easy Rawlins novels Devil in a Blue Dress and Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, while Cullen came to prominence as a poet during the Harlem Renaissance, publishing classics such as Color and Copper Sun.
Each honoree is inducted personally with a few words by a friend or representative, and the 2013 ceremony will be held at New York’s Princeton Club.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

Professor Frank X. Walker Selected as Kentucky's First Black Poet Laureate

By goodblacknews on March 10, 2013
Frank X. Walker, an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky, has been named as the poet laureate of Kentucky by Steve Beshear, the state’s governor. He is the first African-American poet to hold that position.  Walker also serves as the university’s director of African-American and Africana studies program.He will take the position of poet laureate in a public ceremony that is to take place at the state capitol building in Frankfort.
Walker, who is the author of a number of books, has taught at the University of Kentucky since 2010. Before that, he was a member of the faculty at Northern Kentucky University and at Eastern Kentucky University.  He has become well-known for creating the term “Affrilachia,” which is designed to unify Appalachian and African-American culture and history.