Poetry International is now accepting submissions for our 2010 contest.

A prize of $1,000 and publication in Poetry International is given annually for a single poem. B.H. Boston will judge.

Submit up to three poems with a $10 entry fee (entrants may submit additional poems for a charge of $3 per poem.) Deadline is April 23rd. The winner will be announced on our website in the fall of 2010.

Guidelines

• Provide your contact information & titles of all poems submitted, on the title page.

   

• Author name and information should appear only on the title page.

   

• No handwritten entries, please.

   

• Please make your entry easy to read--no illustrations, fancy fonts or decorative borders.

   

• Simultaneous Submission Allowed: You may submit your poems simultaneously.  Please contact us if we need to withdraw your poem(s) because they have been accepted elsewhere.

   

• Poems translated from other languages are not eligible, unless you wrote both the original poem and the translation.

A Note to Previous Poetry International Prize Contestants

You are welcome to enter this year's contest, whether or not you won a prize in the previous year.

 

visionaryproject — December 04, 2008 — In celebration of her new book, "A Mercy," NVLP presents this 2004 clip of Nobel Prize winning author, Toni Morrison speaking about her motivation for writing. To see more oral history interview clips with Toni Morrison, visit:http://www.visionaryproject.org/morrison

==============================

Toni Morrison 

Born February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio

Author; the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature

BIOGRAPHYWriting in a style that has been described as nonlinear and nonsequential, author Toni Morrison’s works turn a critical eye towards subjects that most authors shy away from: racism, segregation versus integration, incest, rape, slavery, infanticide and exploitation. Her narratives weave in spirituality, folk tradition, myth and fantasy combined with much historical detail and research. Over the years, Morrison has resisted the categorization of her work and calls herself a “black woman writer writing for an audience of readers like her.”

Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford to parents Ramah Willis and George Wofford. Her parents were southern sharecroppers who migrated from Alabama to the small steel town of Lorain, outside of Cleveland, Ohio. She and her three siblings grew up in a tradition of family, African-American folklore and storytelling. She also learned hard lessons about racism and the potential for social change.

After graduating from her town’s integrated but predominantly white high school in 1949, Morrison continued her education at Howard University. She majored in English and minored in classics. While at Howard she adopted the name “Toni” and joined the Howard University Players, a drama troupe. While touring with the group in the South, Morrison witnessed the effects of Jim Crow on African Americans. These experiences later influenced her writing. She earned an M.A. in English from Cornell and accepted a teaching position at Texas Southern University in 1955. She returned to Howard in 1957.

By 1964, she became an editor for Random House text books in Syracuse, N.Y. In 1968, she moved to New York City and became a senior editor at Random House for 20 years, mentoring writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones and Angela Davis. While at Random House, she re-wrote a short story she had originally composed as part of a writers group. She expanded this short story into her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1969.

In the years that followed, Morrison wrote Sula and Song of Solomon (winner of the 1977 National Book Critics Award) and Tar Baby. She left Random House in 1983 to teach at the State University of New York in Albany where she wrote her first play, Dreaming Emmett about the murder of Emmett Till. Morrison’s most haunting work, Beloved, was published in 1987 to critical and commercial acclaim. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a movie in 1998 starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. In the 1990’s, Morrison wrote Jazz and Paradise, her sixth and seventh novels. In 1993, she was the first African American writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor, Emeritus at Princeton University where she founded the Atelier program, a collaborative arts project. She is the author of eight novels, one play, four children’s books and several edited collections and critical essays. Love, her eighth novel, was published in 2003.

VIDEO CLIPS 

	Beloved	broadband modem
	Segregation and Racism in Lorain, Ohio	broadband modem
	Motivation for Writing	broadband modem
	Challenges as a Female Writer	broadband modem
	Nobel Prize Winner	broadband modem
	Song of Solomon	broadband modem
	Skin Color	broadband modem
	Classism in the Community	broadband modem
	The Future of African American Literature	broadband modem
	Young People and Possibilities	broadband modem

via: >http://www.visionaryproject.org/morrisontoni/

ExxonMobil paid no federal income tax in 2009. (Updated)

Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS:

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.

Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

Update Forbes has updated its article to include a statement from Exxon: "Though Exxon's financial statement's don't show any net income tax liability owed to Uncle Sam, a company spokesman insists that once its final tax bill is figured, Exxon will owe a 'substantial 2009 tax liability.' How substantial? 'That's not something we're required to disclose, nor do we.'"

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Here's That Wikileaks Video Everyone's Talking About

Vince Veneziani | Apr. 5, 2010, 4:12 PM | 6,376 | 147

 

For quite awhile now, Wikileaks.org has been churning up the press about a video it would release on April 5th, 2010 of several innocent people in Iraq being mowed down by a chopper gunner. About a dozen or so people were killed or injured, including Reuters employees and two children, which is why the video has become a bit controversial in recent weeks.

Well guess what: it's April 5th. Here's the video in full below so you can be the judge of whether or not it's truly "controversial."

Warning: it's a bit graphic.

> via: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/middleeast/06baghdad.html?hp

 

Kevin Powell’s Open Letter to Black America

Friday Apr 2, 2010 – By Kevin Powell

DEAR BLACK AMERICA:

This 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an opportune moment to reflect on how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go. It calls us to reconsider the words Dr. King gave us at the end of his life, when he said that we need “a radical revolution of values.” Certainly, we have much to be proud of. There is the first Black president. There are more Black elected officials, more Blacks in corporate America, the media, and in very real power positions, like Oprah Winfrey, Richard Parsons, Donna Brazile, and Jay-Z.

But, if we are to be brutally honest with ourselves, we’ve also got to acknowledge that things have not been right for some time. The civil rights era concept that our leaders would deliver us into the promised land has devolved into the idea that all we need to do is show up and follow. We have lost the sense of individual responsibility toward collective change.

Think back to the days immediately after slavery, when it was clear that Blacks wanted two things: education and land. In spite of vicious White terrorism, we plodded forward. There was hope, and a vocabulary of purpose. These values emboldened us during the Civil Rights Movement. And they were re-born during the 2008 presidential campaign. Yet, unlike before, many of us have failed to embrace the miraculous kind of self and community transformation that led us to walk, literally, into the teeth of barking dogs, water hoses, and police brutality, mainly because we refused to let anyone turn us around.

Why, politically, did we come out in record numbers for Barack Obama, then instantly return to apathy? Why do we remain suspended in a state of arrested development, believing that a dynamic leader will be our salvation? A civil rights veteran said it best to me many years ago: “We were just happy to get in the door. We never really had a plan beyond that.” So we have to be honest and admit that Black leadership in America, except a few shining examples such as The Brotherhood/Sister Sol in New York City or John Hope Bryant’s Operation Hope, has been too often stuck in yesterday. It has been unable to produce an agenda for Black America that will transform our communities in a holistic way. So we’ve spent 40 years like the Israelites, wandering the wilderness, harboring the misguided expectations that people like Barack, or Oprah, or anyone Black and famous will free us. It simply isn’t going to happen.

And while we’ve been waiting, praying, and producing the same predictable conferences, summits, studies, and reports again and again, Black America is on the brink of catastrophe. We need to remind ourselves that Hurricane Katrina and Haiti’s earthquake only magnify the slow forms of devastation happening each day. They include HIV and AIDS, poverty, Black self-hatred and Black-on-Black violence, the huge class divide, mediocre school systems, and the steady march of our youth into jails and cemeteries. We should stop saying this is a post-racial America because of President Obama. It is not. Despite Barack and Michelle we continue to be bombarded with destructive images of Black people in the mass media. As I travel the country speaking at universities and working for social justice, I note that our prisons are packed with black and brown bodies, and every American ghetto looks exactly the same: a lack of resources, services, and jobs, failing public schools, and limited access to the American dream.

That said, let us no longer wait on a savior to come. Do we want to continue wandering or do we want to create our future here and now? We have the power to transform our communities by enacting those “radical revolution of values.” So I propose six things we must do immediately: Create a Spiritual Foundation; Move Toward Mental Wellness; Take Care of Our Physical Health; Become Politically Active; Understand the Power of Our Culture; and Start a Plan for Economic Empowerment.

Our spiritual foundation must be rooted in God or something greater than us, and a love for self and for all Black folks, unconditionally. It must grow out of our beliefs and our willingness to act selflessly. And it must begin with mental wellness because we cannot stand up for our convictions, our faith, or ourselves if our self-esteem is not in tact. Susan L. Taylor put it best when it comes to our mental health, Black America: healing is the new activism. Be it the increase in domestic violence, homicides and suicides, or the way so many of us say “I can’t” it is clear to me that since the civil rights period our individual and collective psyches have been damaged. But we can heal by seeking counseling and therapy, forming or joining positive support groups, and courageously ridding ourselves of toxic people, even if they are longtime friends, lovers, or kinfolk.

Physically, we can no longer accept that we are pre-destined for diabetes, high-blood pressure, and other ailments. Yes, like all Americans, we should have access to health care. But we should also change our diets and exercise regularly. Recently, my mother was hospitalized. After years of sitting on the sofa watching TV and indulging in terrible eating habits, that was her wake-up call. Change your diet and live. Don’t change and die a painful and preventable death, as many of our relatives have.

Taking charge of our health and wellness also means changing the way we discuss our realities in America. Let us stop bemoaning our “crises” and start strategizing to meet our “challenges.” Let us cease spreading reports that compare us unfavorably to our White sisters and brothers. Likewise, our culture, the way we talk, eat, sing, pray, dance, laugh, and cry must become more balanced so that it no longer reflects solely what is wrong with us, but also projects a vision of how great we can become, or are.

Financially, we’ve got to disconnect our self-esteem from our clothes and cars and instead focus on building true wealth. If my illiterate late grandparents could own land in South Carolina, by saving coins in their day, then we can, too. We can use our resources to empower ourselves, to help our ’hoods, and to support our people. This means doing more than donating to charity. It means a sincere and consistent giving back in terms of time, energy, and presence.

Black America, we’ve been surviving for 400 years in this nation. The question for the twenty-first century is this: Do we want to just survive, or do we want to win? The “radical” answers, if we search hard enough, are right there in our own hands.

Kevin Powell is a writer, activist and author of 10 books, including Open Letters to America. He can be reached at kevin@kevinpowell.net.

 

 

Dreams can come true – Janes miraculous Mitumba story

If your dream was to become a doctor and you ended up uneducated and living in a slum, would you just give up on life? Some of us might have, but not Jane Ngoiri. Jane dreamed of being a surgeon, but she was too poor to finish school or go to college. However, today Jane is a Mitumba queen from Nairobi’s Mathare Valley slum. Mitumba is the business of selling second hand clothing that arrives in Kenya from European and American regions in massive bales.

Mitumba trader in Mathare Valley

Mitumba originally referred to used clothing but today it includes everything from clothes to shoes, bags and even kitchen utensils. Huge markets have sprouted in Nairobi where the traders buy selected items when bales are first opened, and sell them in nicely arranged stalls elsewhere. It’s easy to see how mitumba provides hundreds of jobs for the juakali but everyone is doing it and the competition is intense so prices and profits are low.  Jane came up with a clever way of getting past this by finding a unique niche. Unlike most Mitumba operators who simply sell second hand clothing, Jane adds value by taking the clothes apart and re-making clothing that Kenyans want for their children, especially daughters.

Her specialty is girls dresses, frilly, lacy dresses for special occasions, and Sunday bests. You would never find this kind of thing in Mitumba – western kids don’t wear this kind of thing.  Jane buys used wedding dresses for Ksh 500 (USD 7) and from each one she can create three girls dresses and sell each for Ksh 1,500 (USD 21).

It takes her only 45 minutes to sew each one and she can make and sell up to 40 per month making a tidy profit which has literally allowed her to climb out of poverty.

Janes may not be the slumb dog millionaire but her story of escaping a slum life is humbling. I went to see Jane at home – she now owns her very own two bedroom orange and green house in a new housing development just outside of the city. She has running water, sitting room, a huge kitchen with gas stove, an inside flush toilet and solar lighting.

I visited her former home I n the slum,  It’s hard to imagine how anyone could live in a room six foot by five, with just one bed. The mud floor was covered with a plastic mat but the water in the saturated ground seeped through.

Outside might have been disgusting, but inside the the corrugated iron room was but super neat and carefully arranged. On the bed sat the new tenant, 34 year old Catherine with her two daughters Cynthia (17) and Samantha (3). Her 12 year old son was out. To her right was someone else’s room , and to the left a changaa den (changaa is an illegal distilled alcoholic brew). Behind her were three other rooms.

The room measured about 6 x 6 feet – a prison cell! It was slimy and muddy everywhere, the evil sewage and rotting vegetable smells and the ugly structures were not nearly as invasive as the, noise. It seemed like everyone in Mathare was competing to make the loudest noise, – every room had a radio on full blast as well as the changaa brewing and drinking dens which nearly outnumber homes.  Drunkards (all men) filled the street, and pestered us every few minutes, the community just ignored them as they stumbled down the hill. Children, some without shoes ran around and played in the mud, open sewers and picked through rubbish. After seeing where Jane has come from I can totally understand why she can’t stop smiling.

Her three children are no longer surrounded by filth and noise, changaa dens and drunkards. They play out doors safely, are clean and neat, and they go to school near home. This family eats well as they grow their own vegetables in a garden kitchen. And Jane is no longer just one of the million slum dwellers in Mathare, here in Kaputei, she is a respected member of a budding community.

Janes life story is nothing short of miraculous.   Like everyone else in Mathare, she lived in the slum because she had no other option. When her husband took a second wife so many years ago, she walked out on him and headed for the city, four children in tow, including a baby. She thought she’d be able to get a job, but like many uneducated women her only means of survival in one of Nairobi’s toughest slums, was to use her body. That’s how she survived for many years, doing what she called “dirty business” living from hand to mouth in the filthy, noisy, congested squalor of Mathare Valley, with all her children crammed in one room.

Jane is the poster child of microcredit success, it got her out of poverty and she says it saves her life. She got training and a loan from Jamibora, one of the largest micro credit banks in Kenya. Once she’d paid that back she got another loan, and then a third. This made her eligible for membership in a housing scheme, but first she had to rise 10% of the value of the house, Ksh35,000 ($450).  With her earlier loans she had bought a manual sewing machine, using that she made dresses and beaded jewelry for an international market.  It sounds easy but she says it was very hard to raise the money. There were hurdles along the way and at times she almost gave up her dream.  Perhaps the toughest was the election crisis struck in early 2008 when looters raided the slums and took everything she owned. Without a sewing machine she had lost her means of making a living.

So Jamibora gave her an emergency loan which enabled her to get back on her feet straight away.  Sitting in her proud two bedroomed house in Kaputei Jane glows, it’s hard to disbelieve her story. But there’s more. She wouldn’t let me go until I’d heard the whole story. After getting back her life the first time, Jane decided to find out what her HIV status was. Not surprising, it was positive. Despite this she was in good health, but again she asked God to help – she needs to live long enough to pay off the 20 year loan. She promised to help other slum women by giving free lessons in sewing, after all she never paid for her own classes. So far Jane has taught three others including Catherine.

Are you inspired?  Here’s a question, can you guess why Jane painted her house orange and green?

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Reclaiming one's stories

by elia

Available in: English

04 04 2010

Comments: 0

Countries:
NIGERIA
SENEGAL

Tags:
film, stereotypes

I am embarrassed to say that during my years as a film studing the only film I saw of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène was Moolaadé, and I don't even remember much about it. But the truth is that Sembène was one of Africa's most influential filmmakers, even beyond the continent's borders (as acknowledged by Martin Scorsese while receiving an award recently, just to cite an example).

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that even after his death he continues to inspire filmmakers, such as Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman. They are the authors of an eight-part animated film about not only Sembène, but also about the importance of reclaiming African stories. Combining animation and archival footage, this film shows the making of Sembène as an influential African storyteller, through the dialogue between an 82 year-old narrator named Bouabacar and his grand-daughter Coumba. The film starts with this message:

Africa has survived slavery. We have survived genocide and civil war. We have survived the seizure of our land by outsiders. But we will never survive the loss of our stories. Stories define cultures. Today our stories are only told to us by strangers. I believe Africa has a strong future, but to claim this future it has to reclaim its stories.

Although it's not finished yet, you can watch the first part here [h/t Por fin en África]:

While talking about French colonization, at one point the narrator says that as time passed, the French "spent more energy trying to control our mind and our stories". All this reminded me of a great talk by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story about Africa. In a way, the current portrayal of Africa in a unidimensional way, from a single viewpoint, is a new form of colonialism. The video has made the rounds all over the interwebs, but in case one of my two readers hasn't seen it yet, it's well worth watching:

Marvin X Jackmon April 4 at 8:42am Reply  

December 2010
edition of The
Journal of Pan African Studies
(JPAS)

 

 

 

 

The Journal of Pan African Studies is pleased to announce a special literary arts edition devoted to poetry edited by guest editor Marvin X, poet, playwright, essayist, activist, one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement ,called the USA's Rumi (Bob Holman)  and the father of Muslim American literature (Dr. Mohja Kahf).

 

During the 60s Marvin was an associate editor of the Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue and Black Theatre magazines.

His work appeared also in Black Scholar, Black World and Muhammad Speaks.

 

 

 

All original, previously unpublished poetry will be accepted; however they must be relevant to the Black experience in the U.S., and throughout the world.

 

Book reviews of recent and new publications in the domain of poetry are welcomed and encouraged.

 

For consideration, send final work in a MS word format as an attachment via e-mail to
jmarvinx@yahoo.com before September 30, 2010.

 

Poetry in languages other than English will be considered, however they must also be presented in English, and all submissions must include a name, a short biographical statement, and an e-mail address.

 

For more information on
The Journal of Pan African Studies, visit:
www.jpanafrican.com.

 

 

 

 

Contact: Marvin X, Guest
Editor

Email: jmarvinx@yahoo.com

 

JPAS - Journal of Pan African Studies

www.jpanafrican.com

Journal of Pan African Studies - JPAS. Journal based on African world community studies and research.

 

SEVENTH ANNUAL MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE

Submission Deadline: April 30, 2010

CONTEST JUDGE: Anne Waldman

 

The Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize offers a cash award of $1,000.00 plus publication of the winning book. It is judged by a poet of national stature. The winner's name and title of the winning book are announced and advertised nationally.

Contest Rules for Regular Mail Submissions:
• Submit a manuscript of 48-84 pages of original poetry in any style in English. The manuscript must not have been published previously in book form, although individual poems appearing in print or on the web are permitted. Entries may consist of individual poems, or a book-length poem—or any combination of long or short poems. Collaborations welcome. (Please note: Manuscripts longer than 72 pages may be considered, but please contact us before submitting.)
•Because the contest is judged blindly, submitted manuscript must contain 2 title pages: Your name and contact information must appear on first title page only. Your name must notot appear anywhere else in the manuscript.
• Manuscript should be typed, single-spaced, paginated, and bound with a spring clip.
• Include a table of contents page and an acknowledgements page for magazine or anthology publications.
• Enclose an SASE for announcement of the winner. (If you want to save postage, just check our web site.)
• Manuscripts cannot be returned.
• Postmark deadline: April 30, 2010.
• If submitting by regular mail include a check or money order for $20 entry fee, payable to MARSH HAWK PRESS. Check or money order must be in U.S. funds.

CONTEST MAILING ADDRESS:

Marsh Hawk Press, P.O. Box 206, East Rockaway, N. Y. 11518-0206

For a printable a copy of these rules click here. (Requires Adobe Reader)

IR's 2010 Poetry Prize Guidelines
$1000 Honorarium and Publication
Final Judge: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

POSTMARK DEADLINE: April 16, 2010
Reading Fee: $15
Includes a one-year subscription

• All entries considered for publication.
• Send no more than three poems per entry, 15 pages maximum.
• All entries considered anonymously.
• Previously published works and works forthcoming elsewhere cannot be considered. Simultaneous submissions okay, but fee is non-refundable.
• Multiple entries okay, as long as a separate reading fee is included with each entry.

Entry form must include name, address, phone number, and titles. Entrant’s name should appear ONLY on the entry form. If desired, include self-addressed stamped envelope for notification. Manuscripts will not be returned. Make checks payable to Indiana Review. Each fee entitles entrant to a one-year subscription, an extension of a current subscription, or a gift subscription. Please indicate your choice and enclose complete address information for subscriptions. Overseas addresses, please add $12 for postage ($7 for addresses in Canada).

IR cannot consider work from anyone currently or recently affiliated with Indiana University. In addition, IR cannot consider work from anyone who is a current or former student of the prize judge. We also will not consider work from anyone who is a personal friend of the judge. Nor will we consider prize entries that are submitted electronically.

To use our printable entry form, click here

SEND ENTRIES TO:
Poetry Prize
Indiana Review
Ballantine Hall 465
1020 E. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington, IN
47405-7103

Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago, IL to a Filipina mother and a South Indian father. She attended The Ohio State University where she received her B.A. in English and her M.F.A. in poetry and creative non-fiction. Aimee was the 2000-01 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison and is now associate professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature.

She is the author of At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize which honors the most outstanding book of poetry each year, and Miracle Fruit (2003), which won Foreword Magazine's Poetry Book of the Year Award and was chosen by poet Gregory Orr for the Tupelo Press First Book Prize. Miracle Fruit was also named co-winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award, and finalist for The Glasgow Prize , and the Asian American Literary Award in poetry. Her first chapbook, Fishbone (2000), won the Snail's Pace Press Prize.

Other awards for her writing include a 2009 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, the Angoff Award from The Literary Review, the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, The Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest, an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award in creative non-fiction, and fellowships to the MacDowell Arts Colony. Her poems are anthologized in Language for a New Century (WW Norton); Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford St. Martin's); 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday (HarperCollins); New Voices: Contemporary Poetry  from The United States (Irish Pages); 60 Indian Poets (Penguin); Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Death, Madness, and Everything Else (Univ. of Georgia); Beacon Best Writing of 2000; Babaylan: Filipina and Filipina-American Writing; Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor Writing; Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation; and Eros Pinoy.