The opening line of this call and response style verse asks the question that forms the thread throughout – Blues, what you mean to me? In a magnificent collaboration of words, art, and song, a timeline of the blues is presented in a soulful reading and dramatic musical accompaniment that offers a compelling evocation of the blues experience. A Live Oak Media audio production.

Preferring science and reading to the sports his father wants him to play, Garvey comforts himself with food and endures bullying before joining the school chorus, where he learns how to accept himself and bond with his father.

Award-winning poet and playwright Idris Goodwin interrogates and remixes our cultural past in order to make sense of our present and potential futures.

"Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother's grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments of their lives show a great love between mother and son. Artist and artist, teacher and friend. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's gift includes drawings, emails, hip-hop lyrics, and notes Malik...

I take Liberties-poetic-and take License to relate her story In her voice, to tell History Who she was-as I hear her say Or sing. [...] But still you will come face-to-face With a "Portia," whose life outshines All brilliance this black ink divines.... In his unique brand of spoken word, Africadian poetry, the incomparable George Elliott Clarke explores a personal subject: his great-aunt Portia White. The result is a stirring, epic poem...

As the world celebrates Hip Hop with the Pulitzer Prize and title of "first billionaire rapper," what is lost in the noise of recognition is the craft, artistry, and techniques of Hip-Hop music or rapping. Hailed as a "genius" by Dr. Cornel West and acknowledged as one of the most innovative musicians by Hip-Hop legends and icons of rap, O'hene Savànt redefines the rapper as an "emsee"-an artist with vision and not simply rote technique. In Becoming...

Growing up in the 1980s, in the heart of New York City's downtown music and art scene became fertile ground for seeds of creativity, doubt, and eventual empowerment for Pyeng Threadgill-as expressed through “Lost & Found: Finding the Power in Your Voice”, a collection of personal essays, poetry, and prose. Threadgill offers the reader various entryways to witness the magnificence and fragility of our voices and of our lives. As a performing professional...

In Revolutionary Poetics, Sarah RudeWalker details the specific ways that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) achieved its revolutionary goals through rhetorical poetics-in what forms, to what audiences, and to what effect. BAM has had far-reaching influence, particularly in developments in positive conceptions of Blackness, in the valorization of Black language practices and its subsequent effects on educational policy, in establishing a legacy of populist...

A musical celebration of the joy and survival of black music, song and poetry since the days of America's Civil War. Includes the poetry of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and many others.