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GBN’s Daily Drop: Poet and Pulitzer Prize Nominee Vivian Ayers Allen (LISTEN)

GBN’s Daily Drop: Poet and Pulitzer Prize Nominee Vivian Ayers Allen (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on April 8, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Vivian Ayers Allen not only infused the world with her art (her poem “On Status” was recently sampled by Solange on her 2019 When I Get Home album) but also with artists.

This includes famous daughters Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen as well as the children she’s inspired on the site of her former alma mater, the historic Brainerd Institute in Chester, South Carolina, via her “Workshops in Open Fields” program to educate preschool children in the arts.

To read about her, read on. To hear about her, press PLAY:

(You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website.) Full transcript below:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Friday, April 8th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

The words of Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Vivian Ayers Allen have stood the test of time – and space. Her poem “Hawk,” an allegory of freedom made analogous to space flight, was published in 1957 just before the launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite sent from Earth into orbit.

Enlarged reproductions of select lines were exhibited at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. In 1997 Allen’s family purchased her alma mater, the historic Brainerd Institute in Chester, South Carolina, and soon began offering “Workshops in Open Fields” to educate preschool children in the arts.

And in 2019, fellow Houstonian Solange Knowles used a sample of Allen’s poem “On Status” as read by her two famous daughters – Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen – on Knowles’ acclaimed When I Get Home album.

To learn more about Vivian Ayers Allen, check out Spice of Dawns, her 1952 poetry collection, the Brainerd Institute Heritage website, and links to more sources provided in today’s show notes and the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.

Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.

If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com,Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The 19th Century Poet, Lyricist and Author Who Celebrated Black Speech and Vernacular #WorldPoetryDay (LISTEN)

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The 19th Century Poet, Lyricist and Author Who Celebrated Black Speech and Vernacular #WorldPoetryDay (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on March 21, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

On #WorldPoetryDay, we celebrate poet and author Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African American writers to celebrate Black speech and vernacular in his works.

Dunbar is featured in today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast, based on the Monday, March 21 entry from our “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022:

You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Monday, March 21st, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

Though several O.G. rappers jump-started their careers by selling CDs out of the trunks of their cars, the real O.G. was 19th century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar – he sold his poems to people riding in the elevator he operated!

One of the first African American writers to garner international fame, Dunbar celebrated Black speech and vernacular in many of his works.

In 1903 he wrote the lyrics for In Dahomey, the first all-African American musical produced on Broadway, but his best-known legacy — other than the poem “We Wear The Mask” — most likely springs from 20th century poet Maya Angelou, who “sampled” Dunbar’s poem Sympathy for her autobiography’s title: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

To learn more about Dayton, Ohio native Dunbar, read the 2017 paperback of The Life and Works Of Paul Laurence Dunbar: Containing His Complete Poetical Works, His Best Short Stories, Numerous Anecdotes And A Complete Biography Of The Famous Poet, you can pre-order the upcoming 2022 release Paul Laurence Dunbar: Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett, check out the 2018 documentary Paul Laurence Dunbar: Beyond The Mask produced by the Central Region Humanities Center at Ohio University, and the 2021 episode about Dunbar of the virtual series We, Too, Sing America produced by Aural Compass Projects, currently available on YouTube. A great deal of Dunbar’s poetry also can be found in the public domain.

Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.

Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.

If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.

For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

(paid links)

R.I.P. bell hooks, 69, Acclaimed Author, Activist and Poet

R.I.P. bell hooks, 69, Acclaimed Author, Activist and Poet

By goodblacknews on December 15, 2021

[bell hooks at The New School. Photo: Spencer Kohn, 2013]

Professor, author, and activist bell hooks, who explored and dissected social, political, gender and interpersonal issues in addition to intersectionality in works such as All About Love, Bone Black,  Ain’t I a Woman, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity & Love,  Feminist Theory and Communion: The Female Search for Love, died today at 69.

She passed at home in Berea, Kentucky after an extended illness, according to a family statement from William Morrow Publishers and Berea College in Kentucky, which houses the bell hooks Institute.

Named Gloria Jean Watkins at birth, hooks was internationally known by her lowercase pen name ever since she published her 1978 collection of poems, And There We Wept. hooks took the name to honor her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. (She was told often as a child that her quick thinking and outspokenness was like that of “Granny Bell.”)

To quote from Los Angeles Times:

She attended segregated schools in Kentucky’s Christian County, then went to Stanford University. She later earned a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

She also founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College, which “celebrates, honors, and documents the life and work” of its namesake. hooks also served as a distinguished professor in residence in Appalachian studies there.

In 2017, she dedicated her papers to Berea College so that future generations would know her work and the impact she had on the intersections of race, gender, place, class and sexuality, the school said. The following year, she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

Read more:

Birmingham Native and “Reparations Now!” Author Ashley M. Jones Named Poet Laureate of Alabama

Birmingham Native and “Reparations Now!” Author Ashley M. Jones Named Poet Laureate of Alabama

By goodblacknews on November 5, 2021

[Photo: Ashley M. Jones via Facebook. Credit: Amarr Croskey]

Birmingham native Ashley M. Jones was recently named Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022-2026), the youngest and first Black person to hold the position created 91 years ago.

“Hopefully, as poet laureate, I can shine some light on the work that is being done that is positive and just remind people that the south is still part of the U.S.,” Jones said.

Jones guest edited Poetry magazine earlier this year after the magazine and its publisher were challenged to do more to support poets from marginalized populations and support Black Lives Matter protests. Jones’ 2021 collection Reparations Now! examines history through verse, such as the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls, as well as Jones’ personal experiences with racism.

Jones earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Florida International University, according to jbhe.com. She currently teaches at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, as well as the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

Jones also co-directs the PEN American chapter in Birmingham, Alabama, and runs a nonprofit organization called the Magic City Poetry Festival, which is having an online event on November 13.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/us/ashley-jones-poet-laureate-alabama.html

(paid Amazon link)

Poet and Activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, Wins the $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2021

Poet and Activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, Wins the $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2021

By goodblacknews on October 22, 2021

Esteemed poet, professor and activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, has been awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for being an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form” and “contributed to social change.” The prize includes a cash award of $250,000.

Sanchez has been a leading figure of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, having written more than 20 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My Skin (1999), Morning Haiku (2010) and most recently, Collected Poems (2021).Her subjects range from Black culture, feminism, civil rights, philosophy and peace, and Sanchez, according to the New York Times, “is known for melding musical formats like the blues with traditional poetic forms like the haiku and tanka, using American Black speech patterns and experimenting with punctuation and spelling.”“When we come out of the pandemic, it’s so important that we don’t insist that we go back to the way things were,” Sanchez said to the New York Times. “We’ve got to strive for beauty, which is something I’ve tried to do in my work.”

Other notable recipients of the Gish Prize include artists such as Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Walter Hood and Chinua Achebe.

Among dozens of distinguished honors that Sanchez has received throughout her life Sanchez has also received the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999, the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Medal and the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ inaugural Leadership Award.

Artist Kerry James Marshall to Create Racial Justice-Themed Stained Glass Art for Washington National Cathedral to Replace Confederate Iconography

Artist Kerry James Marshall to Create Racial Justice-Themed Stained Glass Art for Washington National Cathedral to Replace Confederate Iconography

By goodblacknews on September 25, 2021

Washington National Cathedral recently announced it will replace its stained-glass windows that formerly featured Confederate iconography (removed in 2017) with racial-justice themed windows created by world-renowned artist Kerry James Marshall.

The Cathedral’s commission represents Marshall’s first time working with stained-glass as a medium, and the windows are expected to be his first permanent public exhibition anywhere in the country. 

In addition, celebrated poet, author, and scholar Dr. Elizabeth Alexander has agreed to create a new poem that will be inscribed in stone tablets alongside Marshall’s window installation, overlaying the previous stone tablets which venerated the lives of Confederate soldiers.

Completion of both Marshall’s new windows and the stone tablets featuring Dr. Alexander’s new poem is expected in 2023, at which time they will be permanently installed at the Cathedral.  

Dr. Elizabeth Alexander (photo via elizabethalexander.net)

The Cathedral removed windows featuring Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson – which were located along the southern face of its nave, or its main worship space – in September 2017, following the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In the summer of 2020, amid the historic movement for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, the Cathedral began collaborating with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to plan the public exhibition of the Robert E. Lee window. 

“For nearly 70 years, these windows and their Confederate imagery told an incomplete story; they celebrated two generals, but they did nothing to address the reality and painful legacy of America’s original sin of slavery and racism. They represented a false narrative of what America once was and left out the painful truth of our history,” said The Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral.

“We’re excited to share a new and more complete story, to tell the truth about our past and to lift up who we aspire to be as a nation.”   

Marshall—the artist and professor whose paintings depicting Black life in America have been sold, viewed, and showcased across the world for decades—will design the stained-glass windows that will replace the Lee/Jackson windows.

Amanda Gorman, 22, Set to Become Youngest Known Inaugural Poet in U.S. History

Amanda Gorman, 22, Set to Become Youngest Known Inaugural Poet in U.S. History

By goodblacknews on January 19, 2021

Amanda Gorman, 22, is set to become the youngest inaugural poet in memory when she recites her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at President-elect Joe Biden‘s inauguration tomorrow, according to thehill.com.

In 2014, Harvard University graduate Gorman became the the first Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. Three years later she was named the country’s first National Youth Poet Laureate. She will carry on the tradition for Democratic presidents of having celebrated poets read an original piece at inauguration ceremonies.

According to The Associated Press, Gorman said she had been recommended to Biden’s inaugural committee by incoming first lady Dr. Jill Biden. 

Gorman’s poem will follow in the line of noteworthy works by celebrated poets such as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning,” written for the 1993’s inauguration of President Clinton, sold more than 1 million copies when published in book form.

To read more: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/534419-biden-chooses-black-female-activist-as-youngest-known-inaugural

Colson Whitehead, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jericho Brown and More Win Pulitzer Prizes in 2020

Colson Whitehead, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jericho Brown and More Win Pulitzer Prizes in 2020

By goodblacknews on May 5, 2020
Jericho Brown, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead (photos via commons.wikipedia.org and nikolehannahjones.com)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

The Pulitzer Prize winners for 2020 were announced yesterday. Notable among them were Colson Whitehead for Fiction for “The Nickel Boys,“ Nikole Hannah-Jones for Commentary for “The 1619 Project,” Jericho Brown for Poetry for “The Tradition,“ Michael R. Jackson for Drama for “A Strange Loop“ and Anthony Davis for Music for “The Central Park Five.”

And, posthumously, the one and only Ida B. Wells was awarded a special citation for her reporting on lynchings in the late-19th and early 20th century.

The Pulitzer Prize awards were established in 1917 through money provided in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher. The Pulitzers are given yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a US $15,000 cash award. The winner in the public service category is awarded a gold medal.

With his win for “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead becomes the fourth fiction writer to win the prize two times (Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike are the other three) and the first African American writer to pull off that feat.

Whitehead won his first Pulitzer for his 2016 best-selling novel “The Underground Railroad.”

National Museum of African American History and Culture Hosts Digital Poetry Slam Friday, April 24 to Celebrate National Poetry Month

By goodblacknews on April 22, 2020

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is celebrating National Poetry Month with a Digital Poetry Slam on Friday, April 24.

The Museum will accept videos of original poetry performances and still images of poetry-inspired creations that reflect four different themes: Resiliency, Hope, Community, and Jazz. Members, friends, families, aspiring poets, and artists of all ages are encouraged to participate.

If you are interested, visit NMAAHC’s website for inspiration, guidelines, and featured objects from the Museum’s collection.

You can also record a video of yourself performing a poetry piece, or your poetic creation based on one of the designated themes and share your video on your social media platforms using the hashtag #NMAAHCPoetrySlam and tag @NMAAHC so it can “like,” comment, and share.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove Wins $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award From Academy of American Poets

By goodblacknews on November 30, 2019
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove (photo via commons.wikipedia.org)

Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, according to jbhe.com. The award is given annually to recognize “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Established in 1994, the award comes with a $100,000 prize.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah, Dove also served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. She is the only poet to receive the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts.

Dove has published 10 collections of poetry including her latest book Collected Poems, 1974-2004 (2016). In addition to poetry, Dove has published a book of short stories and the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992).

Dove is a summa cum laude graduate of Miami University in Ohio, where she majored in English.  She holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa, and joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in 1989.