Meet Ghanaian Painter Gabriel Eklou

Love, 76 x 89 cm, 2004

Gabriel Eklou

          Bravo to Safia Dickersbach and her efforts, through her production company Showcase, to give international exposure to artists creating on the African continent.  Her first project focuses on artists from Ghana and their work is indeed eclectic, exquisite and immediately engaging.  I am now a fan of Gabriel Eklou’s work. Check out some of his paintings and the video interview of him with Dickerbach.  

  

Legacy, 102 x 102 cm, 2004

Baobab in the wind, 102 x 127 cm, 2013

Here is the link to the video interview:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LAnz2N5-p0

Living in the Time of Breast Cancer

   

Yellow Medicine Review Fall Issue 2013

Yesterday I had my annual mammogram. It is unnerving and shocking to think that in this country, with all of its vast wealth and medical advances, that breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for African-American women and that the breast cancer death rate is 60 percent higher for African-American women than their white counterparts. Have we ever considered, too, about how other women around the world, particularly those with minimal or no access to quality health care- how do they cope with breast cancer?

I have a poem in the current issue of Yellow Medicine Review; A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought.   It is called Homesick Spirits and it is about a traditional healer, in a village setting, in Cote d’Ivoire, trying to deal with the onslaught of a seemingly new phenomenon taking rest in women’s breasts-which of course is breast cancer.

Buy this issue, read the poem and perhaps think about how you can initiate some small change for a huge problem. 

http://www.yellowmedicinereview.com/id13.html

http://www.yellowmedicinereview.com/id13.html

Toni Morrison and Rita Dove to Join Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez at Drexel University

Toni Morrison by Henry Leutwyler

"Sonia Sanchez will celebrate the end of her term as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate with an inspirational night of personal stories, readings and live music at an event entitled “Conversation and Song: Walking the Laureate Road,” hosted by Drexel University and First Person Arts.

Rita Dove

Sonia Sanchez by Laylah Amatullah

Joined by her friends, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize-winner Rita Dove, Sanchez will lead a conversation on what it means to be a literary luminary, the intersection of poetry and prose and how their work impacts their personal lives. Internationally acclaimed jazz vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd will perform throughout the evening."

The event will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 6 from 7:30 p.m. – 9 p.m. in Drexel University’s Main Auditorium (3141 Chestnut St.). Tickets are $35 and are available for purchase online. Discounted tickets are available to First Person Arts members for $28 and to Drexel students, faculty and staff for $5 with a valid Drexel ID. For questions about tickets, please contact Jacqueline Rios at 215-895-6910 or jsr62@drexel.edu.

* Source- Drexel University/Events

Happy Birthday to Thelonious Monk !

Happy Belated Birthday to Thelonious Monk! The best way to keep his legacy alive is to share him with young folks. Mysterious Thelonious by Chris Raschka is my favorite book to introduce the little ones to Monk.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-531-30057-2

Bertrand Russell's 10 Commandments of Teaching

I love these!!!!  ...and so do my little ones !


Bertrand Russell's 10 Commandments of Teaching

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Welcome The 2013 National Student Poets

Photo by Lawrence Jackson 

Here are the new 2013 National Student Poets, of which one is my daughter, Sojourner Ahebee.  These wonderful poets were recently- Sept. 20, 2013-received in the White House by First Lady Michelle Obama, who is the honorary chair of The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.  Featured in the photo with Mrs. Obama are the 2013 National Student Poets Michaela Coplen, Sojourner Ahebee, Nathan Cummings, Louis Lafair and Aline Dolinh.  

The 2013 National Student Poets at Their Appointment Ceremony in Washington, D.C. 

           Here is a link to learn more about the National Student Poet Program:  http://www.artandwriting.org/the-awards/national-student-poets-program/

Here are the 2013  National Student Poets with U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey 

at a Library Congress event in honor of the 2013 National Book Festival. Sept. 20, 2013

Photo Credit- D. Cummings

The 2013 National Student Poets on the balcony outside of the
Poetry Room of the Library of Congress- Photo Credit- D. Cummings 

 Sojourner is representing the Midwest region because she attends boarding school in Michigan.

Supporting partners of the National Student Poets Program include President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services and Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. 

                                      The 2013 National Student Poets with writer Joyce Carol Oates 
                    at the 2013 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.- Photo Credit- D. Cummings 

Poem Raise Your Head and Try Again Featured in Blackberry: A Magazine

My poem, Raise Your Head and Try Again, about the historical amnesia of Europe and the United States when it comes to their involvement in fermenting and benefiting from the crisis in The Democratic Republic of the Congo, has recently been featured on Blackberry: A Magazine's website.  Here is the link. Do share!
http://www.blackberryamagazine.com/spoken-word-wednesday-octavi/

BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY by Langston Hughes

BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY by Langston Hughes

Four little girls

Who went to Sunday School that day
And never came back home at all--
     But left instead
     Their blood upon the wall
     With spattered flesh
     And bloodied Sunday dresses
     Scorched by dynamite that
     China made eons ago
     Did not know what China made
     Before China was ever Red at all
     Would ever redden with their blood
     This Birmingham-on-Sunday wall.
Four tiny little girls
Who left their blood upon that wall,
In little graves today await:
     The dynamite that might ignite
     The ancient fuse of Dragon Kings
     Whose tomorrow sings a hymn
     The missionaries never taught
     In Christian Sunday School
     To implement the Golden Rule.
Four little girls
Might be awakened someday soon
By songs upon the breeze
     As yet unfelt among
     Magnolia trees.

__________________________

Birmingham Sunday By Joan Baez; Remembering Our Girls

Joan Baez has forever been one of my role models of a socially and politically engaged artist.  She has been front and center in campaigns for human rights. Here is a link to Joan singing Richard Farina’s song Birmingham Sunday;  a song in commemoration of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, September 15, 1963
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shgSLKb-onA

James McBride Will Discuss His New Book -The Good Lord Bird-At the Philadelphia Free Library

Writer James McBride

Abolitionist John Brown

“I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years.” These are the words of “Onion” Shackleford, JAMES MCBRIDE’s latest protagonist, looking back on his years running with the ardent and often violent abolitionist John Brown and his ragged ‘freed’ slaves in the Kansas Territory in the late 1850s. Brown’s failed 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) is imprinted in history books, with no former slaves as survivors. But McBride uses the kidnapped Shackelford, disguised as a girl, as a fictitious lens to look back at our country’s ugly and rich history. McBride returned to Radio Times to discuss his new novel, “The Good Lord Bird.” -
Listen here: http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2013/09/05/james-mcbride-retells-the-john-brown-story/

James McBride | The Good Lord Bird  (A) 
When: Thursday, September 12, 2013 at 7:30PM 
Where: Central Library
1901 Vine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
(between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway)

Cost: FREE
No tickets required. For Info: 215-567-4341. 

James McBride is the author of the New York Timesbestselling memoir and 2004 One Book, One Philadelphiaselection, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, in which “race and religion are transcended by family love” (New York Times Book Review). His novels include Miracle at St. Anna—which he adapted for Spike Lee’s film—and Song Yet Sung, a tragic and triumphant tale of a slave revolt in Maryland during the tense days before the Civil War. McBride is an award-winning composer and screenwriter and a former staff writer forThe Boston Globe, People, and The Washington Post. InThe Good Lord Bird, a young boy born into slavery joins abolitionist John Brown’s crusade, concealing his identity and gender to survive.

James McBride will be joined onstage by his band for the "John Brown Good God, Good Lord, Good Riddance Gospel Tour."

* Source- Free Library of Philadelphia 

Are My Hands Clean? - A Thought for Labor Day!

Are My Hands Clean?

Performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock. Sweet Honey in the Rock, Live at Carnegie Hall
Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9sBRnVeUuI


Lyrics and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Songtalk Publishing Co. 1985

I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world
35% cotton, 65% polyester,the journey begins in Central America
In the cotton fields of El Salvador
In a province soaked in blood,
Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day.
Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill
A top-forty trading conglomerate,takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the US of A for the first time
In South Carolina
At the Burlington mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of
Dupont
Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela Where oil
riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day
Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world,
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas
To the factories of Dupont
On the way to the Burlington mills
In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador
In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric
for Sears
Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time—May she be one day soon free—
Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications
For three dollars a day my sisters make my blouse
It leaves the third world for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me
This third world sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for 20% discount

Are my hands clean?