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Tonite! New School Poetics Presents: These Are The Breaks – Chicago Book Launch

ayanacontreras — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 22:03:55 +0000

Idris Goodwin is back home to Chicago tonight to celebrate the recent publication of his first book. It’s a collection of prose, poetry, and essays titled THESE ARE THE BREAKS.
These Are The Breaks is the debut collection by NEA award-winning playwright, HBO Def Poet, and critically acclaimed “indie” rapper, Idris Goodwin. Diverse in scope and wickedly satirical, Goodwin’s poetic essays sample race, class, and culture, transcending the page with hip-hop musicality. Goodwin cross-fades past and present, personal and political: Motown’s last vinyl factory juxtaposes against Bronx rap legends battling in open-air arenas; Chicago’s Public School system contrasts against Santa Fe’s tourism industry; an Egyptian child drowns in the Dead Sea as Nat Turner sprints across Death Valley. These Are The Breaks is the literary mixtape of our cacophonous times.

It’s scheduled to hit shelves in March 2011, but he’ll be selling advance copies after the performance.

If you don’t live in Chicago…

If want to secure a copy sooner than later visit www.WriteBloody.com to place a preorder or just contact me www.idrisgoodwin.blogspot. com or if you use a Kindle you can purchase at Amazon.com.

NEW SCHOOL POETICS presents
THESE ARE THE BREAKS – CHICAGO BOOK LAUNCH
Hosted by Poet, Educator ,WBEZ Correspondent Kevin Coval

Featured Performers: Award Winning Playwright/Performer Tanya Saracho & Poet Lamar “the trufe” Jorden, star of the critically acclaimed documentary Louder Than A Bomb

CHICAGO URBAN ARTS SOCIETY
http://www.chicagourbanart society.org/

2229 South Halsted Street

Chicago, IL

$5 donation, students free. No one turned away

click here for a downloadable preview of the book, slated to hit stores Spring 2010.

Tim & Tom: it wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t so true

ayanacontreras — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:23:27 +0000

As part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, this Saturday meet Tim & Tom… a “Salt & Pepper” comedy team born in the hotbed of sixties Chicago…

Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen met for the first time in tumultuous 1968 Chicago. As the heady promise of the sixties sagged under the weight of widespread violence, rioting, and racial unrest, two young men – one black and one white – took to stages across the nation to help Americans confront their racial divide: by laughing
at it.

“While the country was wracked by the civil rights movement, a sexual revolution, and a controversial war, these friends took the stage as the first—and so far, only—black and white comedy team. Together they spent five years touring the country, facing unabashed racism, occasionally violent hecklers, and cheering crowds. Reid went on to star in the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati and create the influential Frank’s Place, and Dreesen spent 30 years in stand-up, including 15 years as Frank Sinatra’s opening act. The duo returns to the stage to tell their stories and reflect on a lifetime of unique experiences. Ron Rapoport moderates.”

–from Chicagohumanities.org

Where & When:

DuSable Museum of African American History
740 East 56th Place
Chicago, IL 60637

Saturday, October 17th 2pm-3:00pm

Tickets:

Adults: $5.00
Educators & Students: FREE

The book entitled Tim & Tom: An American Comedy
in Black & White is published by University of Chicago Press.

Ronald Fair: Griot of Chicago Tales

ayanacontreras — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:46:41 +0000

1932—

Ronald Fair is perhaps best known as a teller of crisp, satirical, and unsentimental Chicago Tales: inner city stories of struggle, morality, and overcoming (not unlike his own Chicago story). Born in Chicago on October 27, 1932, Fair attended public school. He was inspired as a young man by fellow Chicagoan Richard Wright to begin writing. Wright, as well as a black English teacher encouraged him to keep at his craft despite setbacks.

Fair ultimately published various short writings in the Chicago Defender, Ebony, Chat Noir, and other publications. His first novel, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable, was published in 1965. The book covers the span of time from the Civil War to the 60s, and presents a fictional town called Jacobsville, Mississippi, whose residents were unaware that slavery had been abolished. The work, through symbolism, called for Blacks to wake up and rise against the systemic oppression they were under.

His second novel, Hog Butcher (1966), set in the 1960s, told the story of three inner city Chicago boys and one tragedy that changed a community forever. It was adapted into the film Cornbread, Earl, and Me (1975, see the theatrical trailer below). The film starred a pre-pubescent Laurence Fishburne, and featured a grooving soundtrack composed by Donald Byrd and performed by the Blackbyrds.

Fair’s next work, World of Nothing, was published in 1970. The work consists of two edgy, perse, short novellas: one of which dealt with sexual abuse in the Catholic church and, like Hog Butcher, featured a young central character.

Soon after the publication of Hog Butcher, Ronald Fair moved to Europe, were he remained, as he was “fed up with American racism”. While in Europe, he published what he considered his supreme work,”We Can’t Breathe” (1972). The book covered the lives of five Chicago friends (one of whom becomes an author), and was deeply autobiographical. The book sold well at first, and then sales inexplicably tapered off.

Ronald Fair still writes today, but has dropped off the national literary radar, unpublished in the U.S. in more than twenty years, yet the messages within his work remain eerily pertinent for folks coming up in our hardscrabble city.

In 1971 Fair went to Europe. Later in life he would bemoan the lack of opportunities available to African-American writers, but he was drawn to Europe while he was still riding high career-wise. Like many black creative figures before him, Fair felt liberated in Europe from American racial tensions. He and his wife spent several months in Sweden with support from that country’s government culture ministry, and then enjoyed six months in 1972 in a French villa on an academic house exchange. Fair, according to From Harlem to Paris author Michel Fabre, announced a plan to “buy a house over here and return HOME to France.” Later, however, despite having disliked Sweden’s cold climate, he moved to Finland and remained there.

Ronald L. Fair’s body of work displays contradictory qualities. On one hand, he was a realistic chronicler of the lives of urban African Americans in the 1960s, one who captured the disillusionment of blacks who fled Southern white racism only to discover that Northern cities brought oppression and dislocation of a different kind. On the other, he was a literary experimenter, one who wrote in economical, clipped, often ironic and satirical styles quite distinct from the expansive, preacherly prose of some of his African-American contemporaries. Audiences of the 1960s and 1970s never knew quite what to make of Fair’s writing; he remained less well known than other African-American writers of the period, and he eventually left the United States for Europe, never to return. Yet he had several strong advocates in the literary world, and his output, with several finished but unpublished works, seemed ripe for rediscovery in the new millennium.

Born in Chicago on October 27, 1932, Fair was the son of Herbert and Beulah Hunt Fair, Mississippi farmworkers who took pride in their African heritage. Fair attended public schools in Chicago. He started writing as a teenager as a way of questioning the world in which he found himself and of expressing angry feelings. He was inspired by the example of Richard Wright, one of his prime influences, and a black English teacher encouraged him to keep writing. Fair joined the U.S. Navy in 1950 and served for three years as a hospital worker. He married while he was in the Navy and had two children, but that marriage ended in divorce.

Back home, Fair attended a business college, the Stenotype School of Chicago. He got a job as a court reporter after finishing school in 1955 and remained in that profession for 12 years. Fair kept writing outside of work hours, and he published various short writings in the Chicago Defender, Ebony, Chat Noir, and other publications. His first novel, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable, was issued by Harcourt in 1965.

Fair’s first novel covered a span of a century, from the Civil War to the 1960s, in 120 terse pages. It presented a fictional town called Jacobsville, Mississippi, whose residents remained unaware that slavery was no longer in existence. Against this backdrop, Fair unfolded the various forms of governmental and extralegal horrors that befell African Americans beginning in the Reconstruction era. Reviewers praised the unique bitter tone of Fair’s descriptions of rape and lynching, but many failed to appreciate the symbolism of the novel’s plot, which was directed toward the idea that African Americans had to wake up to the repression under which they lived.

Fair worked as a writer for a year as an Encyclopedia Britannica writer while readying his second novel, Hog Butcher, for publication. Hog Butcher remains perhaps the best known of Fair’s writings. In 1975 it was made into a film called Cornbread, Earl and Me, featuring future superstar Laurence Fishburne as the ten-year-old protagonist and narrator, and it was published in paperback under that title. The book tells the story of a police coverup intended to conceal a mistaken fatal shooting of budding basketball star “Corn-bread” Maxwell. Rich with detail about the lives of transplanted Southern blacks in Chicago and about the myriad ways in which the city’s government and society were stacked against them, Hog Butcher, in the words of Bernard W. Bell in The Contemporary Afro-American Novel, showed “the continuing appeal of traditional realism and naturalism to some contemporary black novelists.”

In 1967, Fair took a job teaching literature at Chicago’s Columbia College. He moved on to Northwestern University the following year and also married his second wife, Neva June Keres, with whom he had one more child. With the help of awards and fellowships that included a stint at Wesleyan University’s Center for Advanced Studies in 1969 and an Arts and Letters Award the following year, Fair became a full-time writer. He taught at Wesleyan as a visiting professor in the 1970-71 academic year.

Despite his new freedom from a nine-to-five workday, Fair’s productivity as a writer slowed down somewhat. His next book, World of Nothing, did not appear until 1970. True to form, Fair changed direction and confounded expectations yet again with that book, which consisted of two short novellas, both with elements of pointed, edgy satire. The story that gives this book its title is a picturesque but sharp and partly surreal portrait of a group of black Chicagoans whose lives interact, while “Jerome” dealt with sexual abuse in the Catholic church and, like several of Fair’s earlier works, featured a youthful central character.

The book Fair considered his supreme effort, We Can’t Breathe, was published in 1972. Another realistic tale, it followed five Chicago friends, one of whom becomes a writer by the book’s end. Strongly autobiographical, We Can’t Breathe won the American Library Association’s Best Book award in 1972 but was criticized, to use the words of New York Times critic George Davis, as “not as well shaped as his previous books.” We Can’t Breathe sold well at first, but sales eventually tailed off.

Fair continued writing after this setback. He won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1975 and worked on an epic novel called The Migrants, which traced a large cast of characters through black America’s Great Migration from South to North. He published two collections of poetry and several short stories in the late 1970s. The Migrants remained unpublished, however, and Fair grew disillusioned. “I’m still writing—seven books looking for a publisher, perhaps that will happen again.…Sorry I can’t be more helpful, but I don’t care to talk about many of these things, …” he told Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor R. Baxter Miller in the early 1980s. “[S]orry they haven’t published more of my books, but you know…they cut off the Black writer…they really cut him off.”

Hey, White Girl! Susan Gregory’s Chicago Story

ayanacontreras — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:49:21 +0000

The intersection of race and class. In Chicago. In the late 1960s. That’s the backdrop of a memoir (rather cheekily) titled “Hey, White Girl!” written by Susan Gregory (Norton, 1970).

In the book, teenage Susan transfers from well-heeled, suburban New Trier High School to attend infamous-even-then Marshall High School on Chicago’s West Side for her senior year.

What’s notable about this book is that save certain specificities (slang, style of dress, et al), the story would probably play out identically today: that’s how little race and class lines have shifted since then in the Windy City.

There are many notable moments in the book: some poignant, some funny, some perfect slices of Sixties Chicago.

“What jam can I mash on you?” the disc jockey asked… The words, the phrases were endless. But I learned them, and slowly they became my own…

…A “humbug” was a fight. A “box” was a record player. “The hawk” referred to the wind… Marshall and WVON helped me build my vocabulary. — from Hey, White Girl

Find a copy, if you dare. Definitely worth the search. It’s wild.

Printers’ Ball Tonite!

ayanacontreras — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:59:47 +0000

Chicago is a hotbed for so many fields of creative art: among them printed arts. From edgy magazines (Alarm, Stop Smiling, et al), to indie book publishers, comics, literary journals, and newspapers, there’s myriad ways to get high on ink!

Celebrate our collective literary history at the Printers’ Ball, organized by Poetry Magazine (an iconic magazine in its own right).

Thanks to poetryfoundation.org for the info.

Fifth Annual Printers’ Ball

Ludington Building
1104 South Wabash Avenue
5:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Admission to the Printers’ Ball is free and open to all ages.

Sneak previews of Printers’ Ball publications, preparations, and secret invitations are available at the official Printers’ Ball blog, Chicago Poetry Calendar: http://chicagopoetrycalendar.blogspot.com.

Special Attractions:

• Free ink on paper, including magazines, books, broadsides, and more
• Hidden treasures
• Printers’ Ball Library, hosted by the Alternative Press Center and the Chicago Underground Library, which invites you to spend quality time with quality print. Visit the library to browse all publications; learn more about your discoveries, what you might have missed, and where to find it; and connect directly with publishers and organizations through our one-stop mailing list and subscription kiosks.
• Busy Beaver ButtonOmatic
• Papermaking and book-binding demonstrations
• Letterpress, offset, and rubber stamp printing demonstrations
• Silkscreen demonstrations by Anchor Graphics
• Minibook-making lessons from Featherproof Books
• Ratso from Chic-A-Go-Go
• Live interviews by Chicago Subtext’s Amy Guth
• Elevated Diction, presented by Silver Tongue

Into Africa: 50 must reads for “Every African”…

ayanacontreras — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:04:34 +0000

…courtesy of afripopmag.com… lots of good stuff for a book nut like me.

Anthem of the Decades, by Mazisi Kunene.
Biko, by Donald Woods
Roots, by Alex Haley
Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal el Sadaawi
Purple Hibiscus + Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimimanda Adichi Ngozi
Our Sister Killjoy, by Ama Ata Aidoo
Head Above Water, by Buchi Emecheta
The Heart of Redness, by Zakes Mda
You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town/David’s Story/Playing in the Light, by Zoe Wicomb
Mother to Mother, by Sindiwe Magona
Unbowed, by Wangari Maathai
Decolonising the Mind, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Anthills of the Savannah, by Chinua Achebe
Hero of the Nation, by Henry Masauko Chipembere
Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane
Distant View of a Minaret, by Alifa Rifaat
So Long a Letter, by Mariama Ba
A long way gone, by Ishmael Beah
Song for Night/Becoming Abigail, by Chris Abani
Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Desert Flower/Desert Dawn, by Waris Dirie
Born Under the Big Rain, by Fadumo Korn
When Rain Clouds Gather/Maru/A Question of Power, by Bessie Head
Women are Different, by Flora Nwapa
The Stone Virgins, by Yvonne Vera
Call me Woman, by Ellen Kuzwayo
And they didn’t Die, by Lauretta Ngcobo
Maru, b y B e s s i e H e a d
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Petals of blood, Weep not child, Ngungi wa Thiongo
Black Sunlight, by Dambudzo Merachera
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutola
Question of Power, by Bessie Head
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston
Ready For Revolution, by Kwame Ture
Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
The Making of Black Revolutionaries, by James Forman
Destruction of Black Civilization, by Chancellor Williams
The African Origin of Civilization, by Cheikh Anta Diop
The Isis Papers, by Francess Cress Welsing
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois simply bcoz this century is about identity
O’ Mandingo!: The Only Black at a Dinner Party, by Eric Miyeni
Gerard Sekoto: I Am An African, by Chabani Manganyi
The Good Women of China, by Xinran just coz Africa and Asia share so much in common
Capitalist Nigger, by Chika Onyeani
African love stories, (edited) by Ama Ata Aido
Black skin, White masks, by Franz Fanon
Scatter the Ashes and Go, Hyenas, by Mongane Wally Serote
Black God of the Sun, by Ekow Eshun
Mavericks, (edited) by Lauren Beukes
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Indaba, My Children, by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa
Development as freedom, by Amartya Sen
The Spirit of Intimacy, by Sobonfu E. Some
God’s Bit of Wood, The Money Order with White Genesis, by Ousmane Sembene
Zenzele: A letter for my Daughter, by J. Nozipho Maraire
The Bible
The Land Is Ours: The Political Legacy of Mangaliso Sobukwe, by S.E.M. Pheko
Subukwe and Apartheid, by Benjamin Pogrund
I Write what I like, Steve Biko
Blues People, by Amiri Baraka
Stolen Legacy, by George G. M. James
Democracy Matters, by Cornel West
Encyclopedia Africana, probably the greatest manuscript about the entire African Diaspora
Speak so You Can Speak Again: The life of Zora Neale Hurston, by Lucy Hurston

The Other Side of Paradise, in plain view

ayanacontreras — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:13:16 +0000

Poet Stacyann Chin’s memoir, “The Other Side of Paradise” (Scribner, 2009), is a coming-of-age story. It’s a tale of growing up never fitting in, not with family, not with social structure. It’s also about living in Paradise (both literally and figuratively), but never feeling as though Paradise’s bounty is available for you. Ultimately, however, the book is about discovering that no man (or woman) is an island in regards to pain and loss…and joy.

A one-time performer on Def Poetry jam, Stacyann Chin’s upbringing was enough to seal in insecurities, and yet, she kept trying to break out beyond her circumstances. She was born on Christmas Day in Lottery, Jamaica, and systematically denied by both her mother and father, something she struggled with throughout her childhood. Stacyann grew up in the slums of Jamaica that tourists never visit, and she suffered abuse that no girl should ever have to suffer at the hands of family… always dreaming of the life of the fortunate ones, always dreaming of being safe and happy.

“The Other Side of Paradise” is a fresh, poetic read that balances images of hope in trying times and the darker side of Paradise.

Below, Stacyann Chin performing “Untitled” on Def Poetry Jam.

Sweet Flypaper of Life: 1950s Harlem in Black & White

ayanacontreras — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:22:56 +0000

Picture it. I’m in high school, late for the morning bus, desperate for something to read during my lengthy commute. On my Grandmother’s disheveled porch, I find a slightly sunfaded paperback. The book is Sweet Flypaper of Life, with text by Langston Hughes and photography by Roy DeCarava (1955). I toss it in my backpack, completely unaware that:

1. My life would never be the same… I would see the world differently from that day on.

2. That paperback was (at the time) thirty years old and worth nearly 100 bucks. I would only discover its value when I attempted in college to upgrade for a hardcover. Apparently, it’s an exceptionally rare book. And I threw it in my backpack. Did I mention it rained that day?

About the book:

Essentially, the Sweet Flypaper is written from the point of view of an older woman in Harlem who is a fixture in her community. She introduces us to each person in her world. We’re let in on their struggles as well as the hard-fought victories in their lives. The Langston Hughes’ text is accompanied by a memorable photo essay by Roy DeCarava.

How I love this book. It captures a time on the cusp of the Civil Rights Era: a time steeped in the Electrified Delta Blues, in Joe Louis Fights, in Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughn, in Miller High Life, in Dixie Peach pomade. It captures something so timeless that it stays with you…. always. I recommend you discover a copy of your own, but until you do, enjoy the pages I reproduced here for you. Jive on!

Achy Obejas presents her “Ruins”

ayanacontreras — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:30:42 +0000

“Achy Obejas writes like an angel: flush with power, vision and hope … one of the Caribbean’s most important writers.”

Junot Diaz, author of Drown, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Achy Obejas, author of “We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” and “Memory Mambo” (stories of Cuban Americans in Chicago), spins disjointed dreams into tangible things through her poetry and prose. And come this month, the Chicagoan has released another book of dreams, entitled “Ruins”. “Ruins”, set to be released on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, bears echoes of Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” reset during the “special period” in Cuba. The main character is “Usnavy”, a dig on the American military’s longsuffering relationship with Cubans. A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Obejas feels she will eventually leave Chicago to settle permanently into Cuba (she left with her family when she was six). She recently told Cafe Magazine, “I live in Chicago, with an ever-diminishing Cuban-American community and far from the Miami epicenter. I am much more interested in being a part of a post-revolutionary Cuba than the diasporic community, which will most likely follow historical pattern and be absorbed into the U.S. mainstream as another immigrant (no longer exile) community.” for more on Obejas and “Ruins”, click here.

I am Not Sidney Poitier

ayanacontreras — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:14:05 +0000

(Graywolf Press, 2009)

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

–from I Am Not Sidney Poitier

This is not a full review… that, my pretties, is still to come. This is just a heads up on “I Am Not Sidney Poitier”, a forthcoming (May ’09) novel by Percival Everett. According to the publisher, Graywolf Press:

“Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem:

“What’s your name?” a kid would ask.

“Not Sidney,” I would say.

“Okay, then what is it?”

Sounds like summer reading to me…..