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Interview with poet Luis J. Rodríguez

Los Angeles author and activist vies for Governor’s office as Green Party candidate

LOS ANGELES, CA – Nationally renowned author Luis J. Rodriguez has announced his intention in running for California Governor under the Green Party in 2014. The Green Party of California will nominate its June 2014 Gubernatorial candidate this November at its bi-annual statewide General Assembly. As a newly registered Green Party member of California and the 2012 Vice-Presidential Nominee for the Justice Party alongside running-mate and former mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson, Luis’s plan is for a campaign aimed at the wellbeing of all Californians – for meaningful and livable jobs; education/training into the new digitally driven technology; green, clean and healthy neighborhoods for everyone; and peace and safety through restorative, transformative and healing urban peace models.

“I’m for a vision of a new California – one that takes care of all its hard working residents, including those that now find themselves without work and even homes, and that strives for the long-range sustainability that is possible in the wealthiest and most resourceful state in the country,” says Mr. Rodriguez. “I am inviting all progressives, labor leaders, community organizers, and, of course, regular folk – across the political spectrum – to unite around a broad movement for a California worthy of each of us. We need to make sure everyone is included in the immense possibilities inherent in people’s imaginations, in their labor, in the technology, and with respectful relationship to our bountiful earth.”

Luis J. Rodriguez is author of 15 books in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. His most well known work, “Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.,” has been called one of the most checked out books in libraries and schools – and perhaps the most stolen. The book has also been named one of the 100 most censored books in the U.S. and was the center of controversy in some California school districts. Yet Luis has received hundreds of letters from youth over the past twenty years addressing how the book inspires and changes young peoples’ lives.

For more than forty years Luis has also worked in gang peace, neighborhood arts, youth development, a labor organizer, a journalist, and in social justice. He has spent 33 years visiting prisons – including Chino, Lancaster, San Quentin, Soledad, and Folsom – and juvenile facilities throughout the state and across the U.S. He has also talked in public and private schools, colleges, universities, libraries, conferences, and urban and rural poor communities. He has 20 years as a Native Mexican/Native American healer working mostly with troubled youth, addicts, formerly incarcerated, battered women, and others.

Along with his wife Trini and others, Luis helped create the nonprofit Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. This unique space includes workshops and performances in the visual arts, music, dance, theater, writing, indigenous cosmology, Open Mics, author readings, film nights, community dialogues, a youth empowerment project, a mural collective, and more – as well as the only annual outdoor literacy festival in the San Fernando Valley: “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung.” And he’s founder/editor of the award-winning small press, Tia Chucha Press, which in 25 years has published more than 50 books of poetry, chapbooks, an art book, and a CD.

Contact: Luis J. Rodriguez 818-898-0013

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Spike Lee’s Amazing Rant Against Gentrification: ‘We Been Here!’

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Amiri Baraka Memorial, Thursday, 20 February, 6:30pm

UC Berkeley Campus | Maude Fife Room of Wheeler Hall (Wheeler 315)

Map

  Biography.com

A celebration of the life work of Amiri Baraka will take place on Thursday, 20 February, at 6:30 in the Maude Fife Room of Wheeler Hall (Wheeler 315) on the U.C. Berkeley campus.

The evening will include music, readings of Amiri Baraka’s work, and brief statements by a variety of writers from the U.C. Berkeley community, the Bay Area, and elsewhere. 

Featured will be Nilofar Gardezi, giovanni singleton, Jane Gregory, Positive Knowledge (Oluyemi Thomas and Ijeoma Thomas), Al Young, Bill Berkson, Steven Lee, Darieck Scott, Rosa Martinez, Robert Hass, Duncan McNaughton, Michael Warr, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Kit Robinson, devorah major, D. Scot Miller, C. S. Giscombe, Lyn Hejinian, Seulghee Lee, Ronaldo Wilson, and William J. Harris.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Holloway Poetry Series and the Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics. A reception will follow.

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© Art Instruction Schools

© Creators.com Syndicate

Courtesy of Creators.com

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Morris “Morrie” Turner, the creator of the “Wee Pals” comic strip and the first African American cartoonist to be syndicated nationally, has died. He was 90.

Family spokesman David Bellard says the Oakland, Calif.-born Turner died peacefully at a hospital in Sacramento, Calif., on Saturday.

Turner developed the humorous, ethnically diverse comic strip about a group of buddies, “Wee Pals,” in 1965 at the urging of his mentor, Charles Schulz. Schulz created the widely popular Peanuts comic strip.

Turner’s strip was also known for its “Soul Corner” that often recognized historical black figures.

In 2003, Turner was recognized by the National Cartoonist Society for his work.

Bellard said Turner was surrounded by family members when he passed away. Services are pending.

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Morrie Turner dies at 90; artist created ‘Wee Pals’ comic strip

‘Wee Pals,’ a gentle tribute to tolerance, was the first nationally syndicated strip with a fully integrated, multiethnic cast.

Steve Chawkins’ obituary of Morrie Turner continues when you click this link

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R.I.P., MORRIE TURNER: Cartoonists say farewell to a friend, a hero, a ‘Wee Pals’ pioneer

By Michael Cavna
January 31, 2014
© The Washington Post

HOW DO YOU say goodbye to someone you never met, yet on some level, through the power of his work, felt as though you always knew?

Morrie Turner had that power, through the heart of his art and the soul of his comic strip. When I read his work, I — like many — felt as though I was entering his world. And what a hopefully inviting realm it was.

Read more

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Morrie Turner Dies at 90; Broke Race Barriers in Comics

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‘WEE PALS’ cartoonist salutes California’s poet laureate (2007)

© Creators.com Syndicate

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Such was the blues
of Langston Hughes xxxx
What was the blues
of Langston Hughes?

Magnify

Brazilian painter Lucílio de Albuquerque (1877-1939): Mãe Preta (Black Mother), 1912

Like democracy, this page is always under reconstruction

Photo: Carl Van Vechten

Jazz & Literature | PRX | Jeff Haas with Sascha Feinstein

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“Looks like what drives me crazy
Don’t have no effect on you —
But I’m gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.”
— Langston Hughes, Selected Poems

africawithin.com

“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong … I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”
– Langston Hughes
(Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary)

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LANGSTON HUGHES FESTIVAL
The City College of New York

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2014 Langston Hughes African American Film Festival Call for Work: Films Wanted

The Langston Hughes African American Film Festival (LHAAFF) now has an online entry system available through Without a Box: at http://www.withoutabox.com/
Here’s some information about our call for Work for the 2014 LHAAFF, which begins on Saturday, April 26 and wraps up on Saturday, May 3, 2014

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Fall 2013 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor

Matthew Pettway
Assistant Professor of Spanish, Bates College

Dr. Pettway is the Fall 2013 Langston Hughes Professor and visiting in the Spanish and Portuguese Department where he is teaching two classes. Since 1977 the professorship has brought scholars in a range of disciplines to campus in honor of Langston Hughes, the African American writer who lived in Lawrence ages 1 to 12 (1903-1916). Professor Pettway is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Bates College where he teaches classes and conducts research in Cuban Cultural Studies, Hispanophone Caribbean Literature and Nineteenth Century Latin American letters. He earned his Ph.D. in Hispanic Cultural Studies at Michigan State University. Professor Pettway’s research can be best described as a literary excavation of Afro-Cuban colonial literature that seeks to gather dispersed fragments of the past in order to define and reconstitute racial and religious subjectivities embedded in the text. His book-length project, Afro-Cuban Literature in a Society of Dead Poets: Race, Religion and Ritual in the Age of Revolution is an analysis of the politics of race and religion in the poetry, narrative, correspondence and trail records of Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, the most prolific black literary writers in colonial Cuba. Dr. Pettway argues that black writers used Catholicism as subterfuge to inscribe an Afro-Caribbean religiosity that transculturated Cuban literature and posited a broad project of emancipation.

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David G. Holmes named 2013 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor

Dr. Tammy Kernodle, Musicologist

Associate Professor of Musicology at Miami University School of Fine Arts

Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle, Associate Professor of Musicology (Miami University School of Fine Arts), graduated cum laude with a BM in choral music education and piano from Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia.Ms. Kernodle received a MA and PhD in Music History from Ohio State University. Her scholarship has focused mainly on various genres of African American music, American music and jazz. She has served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and has lectured extensively on the operas of William Grant Still, the life and religious compositions of jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. Her work has appeared in Musical Quarterly, American Music Research Journal, and a Jane Bernstein’s anthology addressing the contributions of women to music entitled Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds. She is the author of the biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, (Northeastern University Press) which chronicles the life and music of Williams, whose career in jazz spans six decades.

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James Baldwin on reading Hughes’ poetry
(Yale University Library)

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Langston Hughes in 1925

Langston Hughes in 1939

Photographs by Carl Van Vechten

Langston Hughes in 1940

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
–Langston Hughes
(“Democracy”)

Clickable

Langston Hughes

February 1, 1902~May 22, 1967

Courtesy photo

A pack of smokes, a desk, a lamp, a typewriter, a telephone, and a nimble-fingered Langston Hughes

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Courtesy photo

James P. Johnson | 1894-1955 Master stride pianist and Harlem composer of “Carolina Shout” and “The Charleston,”"You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” “Snowy Morning Blues,” symphonic scores, and further classics.

SNOWY MORNING BLUES

in tribute to James P. Johnson & Langston Hughes

New York, you know, has its New Yorks,
Manhattan her Queens, the Bronx
keepers of flames with all their names intact.
Now that’s a fact. Upside it, though,
you’ll put your heart and everything
you know or thought you knew of snow.

When Snowy Morning Blues plays James P. Johnson’s
game of catch-me-if-you-can, you can. He could, too.
New York ain’t no last word, you know.
Nothing’s what it used to be. And you, the you who sees
out past the end of the world, this snow, this wee wind-
fall he fells us with under eaves the way we all fall
under suspicion in detective movies.
Blam! Blame it on the blues, blame it on a blizzard.

Diamonded, grounded in its ice cream crisscross,
snow makes you take to the country again, harmonica in hand,
craving the guitar of a pianistic You-Gotta-Be-Modernistic
genius — you can’t get into this. Let snow tell its own story.
Let the blues roll on. Let snow fall right on time this time
blue, blank, blackening the city-within-a-city christened
in Dutch: Harlem, Haarlem,
Haaaarrrrrlem.
Vermeer, beware.

— Al Young

© 2001, 2006 and 2007 by Al Young
from The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000;
reprinted in Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry

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Historic photo

Langston Hughes in Lawrence, Kansas: Photographs & Biographical Resources
by Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso

Langston Hughes, the great American poet who inspired the Harlem Renaissance, spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. Authors Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso assemble photos & new research about Lawrence sites associated with Langston Hughes. Hughes lived with his grandmother in Lawrence much of the time from his birth in 1902 until his grandmother’s death in 1915. Because of the efforts of Lawrence preservationists, many of the structures are still standing.

LANGSTON HUGHES at PAL
(Perspectives in American Literature):
A Research and Reference Guide
An Ongoing Project
© Paul P. Reuben

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Langston Hughes, the busboy-poet, Washington, DC, early 1920s

« Read the 1967 NY Times obituary account of how busboy on-duty Langston Hughes got “discovered” after he slipped three poems under poet Vachel Lindsay’s luncheon plate at the Wardman Park Hotel, where young Hughes worked. »

Visit the website of DC’s Busboys and Poets, a restaurant, bookstore, fair trade market and gathering place, where people can discuss issues of social justice and peace. Each Busboys and Poets location should enhance the community — allowing us to bring together a diverse clientele reflective of the surrounding neighborhoods. Busboys and Poets creates an environment where shared conversations over food and drink allow the progressive, artistic and literary communities to dialogue, educate and interact. Busboys and Poets is a community gathering place.

First established in 2005, Busboys and Poets was created by owner Anas “Andy” Shallal, an Iraqi-American artist, activist and restaurateur. After opening, the flagship location at 14th and V Streets, NW (Washington DC), the neighboring residents and the progressive community, embraced Busboys, especially activists opposed to the Iraq War. Busboys and Poets is now located in three distinctive neighborhoods in the Washington Metropolitan area and is a community resource for artists, activists, writers, thinkers and dreamers.

BRASS SPITTOONS

by Langston Hughes

Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
Hey, boy! A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar, Two dollars
Buys shoes for the baby.
House rent to pay.
Gin on Saturday,
Church on Sunday.
My God!
Babies and gin and church and women and
Sunday all mixed up with dimes and dollars
and clean spittoons and house rent to pay.
Hey, boy!
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord,
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David’s dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean bright spittoon all newly polished –
Come ‘ere, boy!

© Estate of Langston Hughes

This spittoon-shaped poem first appeared in New Masses, December 1926; reprinted in Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927.

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Al Young comments:
Reading in my late teens I Wonder As I Wander — Langston Hughes’ autobiographical follow-up to The Big Sea – I was enthralled and inspired by the tales he weaves of his travels throughout the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Europe, the USSR, Soviet Asia, and China. One of Hughes’ lingering memoirs describes a voyage that he and 20 other African Americans took to Russia during the Great Depression to make a movie called Black and White. While his 1956 account of this episode does not match up with documents lately uncovered in the U.S. and in Russia, Hughes’ socio-romantic flashback lives on in imagination. This sunny picture invites us to peer into the faces of some amazingly contemporary-looking passengers, who made that fabled crossing: Langston Hughes with his friends aboard the Europa-Bremen, June 17, 1932. Seated front center from left to right are Louise Thompson Patterson and Dorothy West. On board ship was also Ralph Bunche, who was visiting Paris with Alain Locke.

Photograph courtesy of Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Hughes poses with neighborhood kids in the cramped, flowering confines of what they called “Our Block’s Childrens Garden” — and long before seed-leasing and genetic modification became commonplace.

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