Call for Papers

- Writing through the

Visual/Virtual:

Inscribing Language,

Literature, and Culture

in Francophone Africa

(Rutgers University)

Deadline: 1 November 2012

Writing through the Visual/Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean (March 7-9, 2013)

This two‐day conference at Rutgers University (New Brunswick) is designed to foster trans‐disciplinary understanding of the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. It will explore the varied patterns of cultural, and especially writing, formations and practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted on the cultures and peoples of this trans‐Atlantic region that includes countries such as Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Comoro Islands, Congo (Brazzaville), Congo (DR), Dominica, Guadeloupe, Guiana, Haiti, Louisiana (USA), Mali, Martinique, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Seychelles. Special attention will be paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and nonmaterial culture to tell “stories” of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the “classical” and the “popular” in new ways.

Possible topics for the conference include (but are not limited) to the following:

A. Graphic symbols and collective memory

B. Politics of fashion/political pagnes/proverbs on pagnes

C. Gendered spaces of writing (on walls, cooking pots, the ground, taps‐taps)

D. Comics/bandes dessinées, books, film and literacy

E. Body art (tattooing, scarification) using henna, ink

F. Reading relief, surface scripts, vèvè et vaudou

G. Inscribing orality: history, Hip‐Hop, and rap

H. Scripts: Bagam, calligraphy, graffiti, ideograms

I. Creation, publication, consumption, consumerism

J. Langue vernaculaire/langue véhiculaire : Kreyòl, Wolof, Lingala/French, Arabic

K. Intracultural/Intercultural communication and new technologies : blogs, Facebook, Twitter

L. Languages in contact: creolization, translation, and transnational dynamics

Proposals are invited from all disciplines. Proposals will be accepted for individual papers or for panels. Paper proposals must include the author’s name, the paper title, an abstract, and the author’s brief biography. Panel proposals must include a chair, list of no more than 4 presenters, a one‐page summary of the session theme, short bio and abstracts for all papers. In addition to papers, we also invite artists to submit their work for display. The conference will also include film screenings, art exhibitions, fashion shows.

Please submit electronically a 100 to 200‐word abstract and panel proposal by November 1, 2012 to the following address:

writing_through_the_visual_virtual_2013@email.rutgers.edu
Ousseina Alidou and Renée Larrier
Rutgers University
Center for African Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Lucy Stone Hall A346, 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue
Piscataway, NJ 08854
t:848.445.6638 | f:732.445.6637 |
http://ruafrica.rutgers.edu

CONTACT INFORMATION:

For queries/ submissions: writing_through_the_visual_virtual_2013@email.rutgers.edu

Website: http://ruafrica.rutgers.edu

Entries from

Anywhere in the World Welcomed:

The Sue Nunn Show

Poetry Competition

(€300 top prize)

Deadline: 31 August 2012

Sue Nunn Show listeners! Send us your poems about your memories of childhood. You can be any age and you can come from anywhere in the world; you just need to be a listener.

What are your memories of childhood? Hot summer days in the paddling pool, fishing by the river, building snowmen, looking after younger brothers and sisters, story time, saving hay, picnics, birth, death, walking for miles to get water or firewood, bringing milk to the creamery, a new pet, ice skating, camping… the happy, the tragic, the poignant, the funny. Whatever your memories, wherever they are set, put them in a poem and get them to us. (Oh yes, and please read the rules below).

PRIZES

• 1st prize: €300

• 2nd prize: €200

• 3rd prize: €100

The prize winners will be announced in October 2012.

All entries must be accompanied by an entry form or use the online form here.

You can request an entry form from KCLR96fm, Broadcast Centre, Carlow Road, Kilkenny or email thesuenunnshow@kclr96fm.com. You can also call 1890 909696 and request an entry form. You can enter by post to KCLR96fm, Broadcast Centre, Carlow Road, Kilkenny. You can also deliver your entry by hand to reception at either our Kilkenny studio, Broadcast Centre, Carlow Road, Kilkenny or our Carlow studio, Potato Market, Carlow .

THE RULES

The Sue Nunn Show Poetry Competition 2012 (the ‘Competition’) is organised by The Sue Nunn Show and KCLR.

Entrants: Entries may be submitted from anywhere in the world. The Competition is open to anyone who is not otherwise excluded by these rules. Employees of KCLR are not eligible to enter the Competition.

Entrant Identity: Participation may be under an entrant’s real name or under a pseudonym. The author’s legal name must be registered on the official entry form. Prizes can only be awarded to a “real person.”

Poems

• All poems must have a title.

• Poems must be on the theme of “Memories of Childhood.”

• Poems must be in English. The name of the writer or any other identifying marks must not appear on the submitted entry.

• Alterations cannot be made to poems after they have been submitted. Poems should not be obscene, offensive, defamatory or libellous.

• Poems must be entirely the work of the entrant and must never have been published, self-published, published on a website or broadcast or have won a prize in any other competition prior to the announcement of the winners (October 2012).

• There is no restriction on the number of poems that any one competitor may submit.

• Each competitor must complete an official application form. One application form will cover multiple entries.

• Confirmation of entries will normally be emailed at the time of submission.

• Entries may be emailed, posted or hand-delivered.

• It is preferable that entries should be typed but, if handwritten, handwriting should be clear and easy to read.

• Poems will not be returned, so please keep a copy.

• If you would like confirmation that your postal entry has been received, please include a stamped addressed envelope/postcard with your entry. Online entries made via the website will receive automatic confirmation at the time of submission. KCLR staff are unable to confirm the content of documents submitted online, so please ensure you send the correct file.

Judging

• The three judges will be chosen by The Sue Nunn Show team who reserve the right to make appropriate and necessary changes to the judging panel.

• The entries will be judged anonymously and the poet’s name must not appear on the poem itself.

• The judging will take place in the month following the closure of the Competition.

• The judges’ decision is final and neither the judges nor KCLR staff will enter into any correspondence.

Timetable: The deadline for entries is midnight (Irish time) 31st August 2012.

Copyright

• The copyright of each entry remains with the author.

• In the case that an entry is selected for publication, by submitting an entry, the Entrant grants a non-exclusive worldwide licence to KCLR to broadcast and publish the entry (and any background information supplied by the entrant) in an anthology (in any digital or print format) and on the KCLR website.

• By participation in the Competition, the Entrant grants a non-exclusive worldwide licence to KCLR to publish and broadcast any comment (made in the judging process) either in an anthology (in any digital or print format) and on the KCLR website.

Prizes

• 1st prize: €300

• 2nd prize: €200

• 3rd prize: €100

The prize winners will be announced in October 2012. KCLR can decide not to award prizes if, in the judges’ opinion, such an action is justified.

General

• KCLR accepts no liability to any user of this site or any third party for any damage or loss suffered as a consequence of use of this site.

• KCLR cannot accept responsibility for any damage, loss, injury or disappointment suffered by any entrant entering the Competition.

• The Competition and Rules will be governed by Irish Law and any disputes will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Irish courts. As a condition of entering the Competition, entrants must ensure that by doing so, they do not contravene any laws of their own country of residence.

• KCLR reserves the right to amend these Rules where it is deemed necessary to do so or where circumstances are beyond KCLR’s control.

• In the event of any dispute regarding these Rules or any other matter relating to the Competition, the decision of KCLR shall be final and no correspondence or discussion shall be entered into.

• Entry of the Competition implies unqualified acceptance of all the Competition’s Rules.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

For queries: thesuenunnshow@kclr96fm.com

For submissions: via the online submission page

Website: http://kclr96fm.com

KRISTA FRANKLIN

“Through the poems that I write, I seek to forge a path in the wilderness of the human experience…”  – Krista Franklin

Poet and visual artist Krista Franklin’s work openly reveals the subjectivity of the processing of human experience.  In some ways it highlights the relevance of the creative process that takes place within all human beings whether or not we choose to express it.  Through its artistic expression of the science of the mind, senses and spirit, her work makes sense of the wilderness by simply being present.

(Images: Krista Franklin, The Beautiful Dance, 2007, mixed media and it’s tricky (r.i.p. JMJ), 2007, mixed media)

Franklin’s writing and collage work express her own particular poetic that dips in and out of connection with the collective via moments of shared symbolism and experience. It’s almost as if her work paints with image and word a grid of moments that can be connected like dots on a map. Moments that ultimately reveal we each walk our own path of perception.  It is clear that impressions, whether verbal, visual or sensual, drive the Franklin aesthetic.  Interestingly, she manages to create a most subtle distinction between impression and statement.  Her main subject/image is bold enough to stand out in each piece, but becomes less objectified when considered in relations to its surrounding matter thus revealing, the instability of objectivity and the reality of subjectivity.

(Image: Krista Franklin, Transatlantic Turntable-ism, mixed media. from Callaloo‘s Hip Hop issue.)

The larger implications of Franklin’s art practice speak to the spiritual and metaphysical realm in the sense of finding peace with the unknown.  Making a commitment to explore and participate in the experience of life from the vantage point of surrender.  Her practice also suggests one’s opinion is simply one’s opinion, one’s taste is simply one’s taste and thus, one’s experience is simply one’s experience.  Live it deeply or miss the hidden bounty of life.

(Image: Lillian Bertram, Krista Franklin, 2008)

Krista Franklin’s poetry and visual art have most recently appeared in RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, and the anthology Gathering Ground. Her mixed-media collages have been published on the covers of award-winning books, and she has exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Franklin is also a Cave Canem Fellow, and the co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars.

__________________________

A Natural History of

My Drapetomania

Text and Art by Krista Franklin

"Drapetomania #2", Mixed Medium, Krista Franklin

*   *   *

In 1851 Lousiana physician Samuel A. Cartwright introduced America to a theory that he thought would serve to explain the aberrant behavior of black slaves “absconding from service.”  He called the “disease” of those who sought to flee captivity drapetomania and outlined the symptoms and treatments in his essay “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race.”  Dr. Cartwright suggested reinforcing the subservience of the black slave to his white slaveholder to treat the disease.  He prescribed treating the black slave like a child and by delivering sound beatings only in the cases of those persistently afflicted slaves as the cure for this pesky mental ailment—the desire to be free.

Nearly 130 years after Cartwright kicked the bucket, a cracking, black and white photograph of my 18-month-old mother falls under my gaze.  The picture, small and curling at its white-bordered corners, shows the back of my tiny mother barely walking, moving away from the camera, the hem of her baby dress haphazardly tucked into the top of her diaper.  One foot hovers precariously off the ground; she is in the throes of movement.

“This is the day she ran away from home,” my grandmother says, giggling at her first daughter’s blossoming desire to escape.

*   *   *

Not nearly as advanced as my predecessor, around eleven I begin to push my body against the neighborhood’s borders, roaming into woods along paths past thickets. Even as fear rides piggyback and my nostrils flare like a deer’s at the scent of the unknown, I press on across fallen leaves; errant branches scrape my arms, a phantom sound, someone behind me.  I spend minutes like I spend money, squatting at the creek’s edge watching minnows swirl each other in their watery dance.  When I go home, my Zips are caked in mud.  I smell like grass.

Around this time, at a church picnic the pastor asks me to get her nephew, who is also my age, a hot dog from a nearby table.  I tell her “I’m not in the service.”

This is a story that my grandmother also relishes.

*   *   *

The radio is a bad influence, lures me further away, summons me to Salem Mall, through its heavy glass doors to feast on the hallucinogen of consumerism.  Here garments beckon me to try on, be transformed, but Camelot Records spins a sticky web, offers a hundred shrink-wrapped escape plans begging to be bagged.  I leave sweaty-palmed with something to take home, my allowance pick-pocketed by the record industry.

When the needle drops, I’m drawn outside myself.  My scalp tingles.  The sounds spin revolving doors I walk through in my mind.

Like the countless Negroes who used their skin as their disguise, passing as white to spin the yarn of a life, I master the art of a malleable identity.  Music is one of the places I learn: 1) how to speak like a white girl from the Valley, 2) how to walk like an Egyptian, 3) how to be, when the occasion calls for it, off the wall.  I try on identities like jeans.

By the time I’m thirteen I spend approximately 65% of my waking life  putting on “whiteness,” because in some crude, unarticulated way, in my mind “whiteness” is equivalent to “freedom.”

It’s been said that the human brain hasn’t reached its full development until a person is in her mid-twenties.  Whether this has anything to do with me eventually relinquishing that ridiculous arithmetic around that age is unknown to me.

*   *   *

Once during my adolescence my mother told me, “Children are like tiny anchors,” and asked me through a series of elaborate questions, did I like being free?

*   *   *

At the university I practice late-night-slip-outs like I should be memorizing lines from textbooks to pass tests.  Side roads and alleys become familiar.  I visit unfamiliar bars, hide out in the movie theater, hop in my car and skip town.  For one week straight I forget that I’m enrolled and spend days in my pajamas watching television, reading books I checked out from the campus library, and refusing to answer the phone.  Classes are an afterthought.

*   *   *

The last time I held a full-time job I had to be prescribed anti-depressants.

*   *   *

As a child I used to have a recurring dream where I was running across the freakishly deserted, green campus of my elementary school being chased by a man whose face I can never see.  Once he almost caught me, but I woke up.

*   *   *

"Wanderlust Wonderland", Collage, Krista Franklin

*

Krista Franklin toils in Chicago, rubbing her hands fiendishly plotting her next great escape.

*

Notes:

“A Natural History of My Drapetomania” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

You can find out more about Krista Franklin at kristafranklin.com and the Tres Colony website. And you can find more of her images online at CultureServe.netand  delirious hem.

The collage “Wanderlust Wonderland” first appeared in the MiPoesias.com issue guest edited by Evie Shockley.

>via: http://owlsmag.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/a-natural-history-krista-franklin/

__________________________

Krista Franklin is a poet, visual artist and educator who hails  from Dayton, OH, and currently works and resides in Chicago, IL.  Her poems and visual art have appeared in/on several literary journals and websites, including Nexus Literary and Art Journal, Warpland, Obsidian III, nocturnes 2: (re)view of the literary arts,  www.semantikon.com,  www.milkmag.org, www.ambulant.org, and www.errataandcontradiction.org.    She has also been published in the anthologies The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order and Bum Rush The Page: a def poetry jam. She is a  Cave Canem fellow, and was a featured poet in the 2000 New Voices New Worlds Series in St. Louis, MO. UNTITLED (2005) UNTITLED FAMILY PORTRAIT #1 (2004) LEADBELLY #2 (2004) BLACK & HISPANIC CAUSING PANIC (2003) DADDY WE HAVE MUCH TO TELL YOU (2004) TRANSATLANTIC TURNTABLISM (2005) STRAUDER 3000 - AN AFROFUTURISTIC FAMILY PORTRAIT (2004)

>via: http://www.youngchicagoauthors.org/girlspeak/2005/kristafranklin.html

__________________________

Michael Warr

On Blackness Re-imagined:

A Performance

and Conversation with

Krista Franklin and

Michael Warr

June 8, 2012

By: Illinois Humanities Council

 

 

00:00

   00:00 

57:21

 

 

IHC/file

Krista Franklin

 

Download On_Blackness_Reimagined.mp3

Krista Franklin and Michael Warr perform poems from their new collections. Franklin's Study of Love & Black Body is a small collection of poems that deals with ideas of motherhood, the body, cultural and internal conflict, and identity from a variety of angles. In The Armageddon of Funk, Warr manages to interconnect a world of opposites. Via "poetic memoir" we encounter the morality of Jehovah's Witnesses, the revolutionary theories and free love of Black Panthers, the promise of a bourgeois future from bank executives, and more.

Listen in to an evocative evening of performance and conversation.

Krista Franklin is a poet and visual artist from Dayton, OH, who lives and works in Chicago. Her poetry and mixed medium collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Coon Bidness, Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam and Callaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. II, F-K, and Gathering Ground. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of award-winning books and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Franklin is a Cave Canem Fellow, a cofounder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual, and performance artists, musicians, and scholars, and a teaching artist for Young Chicago Authors, Neighborhood Writing Alliance, and numerous organizations in the city of Chicago.

Michael Warr was honored by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association for his new book of poetry The Armageddon of Funk. He is also author of We Are All The Black Boy, and an editor of Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex, all published by Tia Chucha Press. Other literary awards include the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and the Ragdale Foundation U.S.-Africa Fellowship. A frequent collaborator with musicians and visual and performing artists, Michael’s poems have been dramatized on stage, depicted on canvas, and set to original music compositions. His recordings can be found on the CDs A Snake in the Heart: Poems and Music by Chicago Spoken Word Performers and nefasha ayer—the space of in between (featuring Meklit Hadero), and at www.poetryspeaks.com/michaelwarr.

Watch Trailer for Docu

"Sarabah"

About Senegalese

Rapper/Singer/Activist

Sister Fa

by Vanessa Martinez | September 22, 2011

The film Documentary Sarabah will be featured at the 2011 Heartland Film Festival, which runs from Oct 13th through Oct 22nd. The 60-min documentary by Gloria Bremer and Maria Luisa Gambale centers around Senegalese rapper/singer/activist Fatou Mandiang Diatta AKA Sister Fa and her music and activism against "Female Genital Cutting" of girls in Senegal.

Full storyline:

Rapper, singer and activist, Sister Fa is a hero to young women in Senegal and an unstoppable force for social change. A childhood victim of female genital cutting (FGC), she tackled the issue by starting a grassroots campaign, "Education Without Excision," which uses her music and persuasive powers to end the practice.

But until 2010 there's one place she had never brought her message - back home to her own village of Thionck Essyl, where she fears rejection. Sarabah follows Sister Fa on this challenging journey, where she speaks out passionately to female elders and students alike, and stages a rousing concert that brings the community to its feet. A portrait of an artist as activist, Sarabah shows the extraordinary resilience, passion and creativity of a woman who boldly challenges gender and cultural norms. It's an inspiring story of courage, hope and change.

For festival ticket information, click HERE.

Watch the trailer below.

To watch the entire documentary, to read background information and to order DVDs, visit:
http://newsreel.org/video/FOR-MY-PEOPLE-MARGARET-WALKER
A literary biography of a seminal figure of 20th century American literature, Margaret Walker, who established one of the first Black Studies centers in the nation, and mentored the Black Arts movement of the 1960s.
http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0035

MARGARET WALKER

• July 7, 1915 Margaret Abigail Walker, poet and writer, was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Walker earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University in 1935 and began working with the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1940, she earned her Master of Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa and in 1965 she returned to that school to earn her Ph.D. In 1942, she published her most popular poem, “For My People,” which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. Walker served as a literature professor at what is now Jackson State University from 1949 to 1979. In 1966, her novel “Jubilee” was published to critical acclaim. In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People, which was renamed the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center in her honor, at Jackson State. Walker died November 30, 1998.

__________________________

Margaret Walker

1915–1998

When For My People by Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1942, "she became one of the youngest Black writers ever to have published a volume of poetry in this century," as well as "the first Black woman in American literary history to be so honored in a prestigious national competition," noted Richard K. Barksdale in Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960. Walker's first novel, Jubilee, is notable for being "the first truly historical black American novel," reported Washington Post contributor Crispin Y. Campbell. It was also the first work by a black writer to speak out for the liberation of the black woman. The cornerstones of a literature that affirms the African folk roots of black American life, these two books have also been called visionary for looking toward a new cultural unity for black Americans that will be built on that foundation. 

The title of Walker's first book, For My People, denotes the subject matter of "poems in which the body and spirit of a great group of people are revealed with vigor and undeviating integrity," wrote Louis Untermeyer in the Yale Review. Here, in long ballads, Walker draws sympathetic portraits of characters such as the New Orleans sorceress Molly Means; Kissie Lee, a tough young woman who dies "with her boots on switching blades"; and Poppa Chicken, an urban drug dealer and pimp. Other ballads give a new dignity to John Henry, killed by a ten-pound hammer, and Stagolee, who kills a white officer but eludes a lynch mob. In an essay for Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Eugenia Collier noted, "Using ... the language of the grass-roots people, Walker spins yarns of folk heroes and heroines: those who, faced with the terrible obstacles which haunt Black people's very existence, not only survive but prevail--with style." Soon after it appeared, the book of ballads, sonnets, and free verse found a surprisingly large number of readers, requiring publishers to authorize three printings to satisfy popular demand. 

"If the test of a great poem is the universality of statement, then 'For My People' is a great poem," remarked Barksdale. The critic explained in Donald B. Gibson's Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays that the poem was written when "world-wide pain, sorrow, and affliction were tangibly evident, and few could isolate the Black man's dilemma from humanity's dilemma during the depression years or during the war years." Thus, the power of resilience presented in the poem is a hope Walker holds out not only to black people, but to all people, to "all the Adams and Eves." As she once remarked, "Writers should not write exclusively for black or white audiences, but most inclusively. After all, it is the business of all writers to write about the human condition, and all humanity must be involved in both the writing and in the reading." 

 

Jubilee, a historical novel, is the second book on which Walker's literary reputation rests. It is the story of a slave family during and after the Civil War, and it took her thirty years to write. During these years, she married a disabled veteran, raised four children, taught full time at Jackson State College in Mississippi, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. The lengthy gestation, she believes, partly accounts for the book's quality. As she told Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work,"Living with the book over a long period of time was agonizing. Despite all of that,Jubilee is the product of a mature person," one whose own difficult pregnancies and economic struggles could lend authenticity to the lives of her characters. "There's a difference between writing about something and living through it," she said in the interview; "I did both." 

The story of Jubilee's main characters Vyry and Randall Ware was an important part of Walker's life even before she began to write it down. As she explains in How I Wrote "Jubilee," she first heard about the "slavery time" in bedtime stories told by her maternal grandmother. When old enough to recognize the value of her family history, Walker took initiative, "prodding" her grandmother for more details, and promising to set down on paper the story that had taken shape in her mind. Later on, she completed extensive research on every aspect of the black experience touching the Civil War, from obscure birth records to information on the history of tin cans. "Most of my life I have been involved with writing this story about my great-grandmother, and even if Jubilee were never considered an artistic or commercial success I would still be happy just to have finished it," she claims. 

Soon after Jubilee was published in 1966, Walker was given a fellowship award from Houghton Mifflin. Granting that the novel is "ambitious," New York Times Book Review contributor Wilma Dykeman deemed it "uneven." Arthur P. Davis, writing inFrom the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960, suggested that the author "has crowded too much into her novel." On the other hand, Abraham Chapman of theSaturday Review appreciated the author's "fidelity to fact and detail" as she "presents the little-known everyday life of the slaves," their music, and their folkways. In the Christian Science Monitor, Henrietta Buckmaster commented, "In Vyry, Miss Walker has found a remarkable woman who suffered one outrage after the other and yet emerged with a humility and a mortal fortitude that reflected a spiritual wholeness." Dykeman felt that, "In its best episodes, and in Vyry, 'Jubilee' chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages." Later critical studies of the book emphasize the importance of its themes and its position as the prototype for novels that present black history from a black perspective. Roger Whitlow claimed in Black American Literature: A Critical History, "It serves especially well as a response to white 'nostalgia' fiction about the antebellum and Reconstruction South." 

 

Walker's next book to be highly acclaimed was Prophets for a New Day, a slim volume of poems. Unlike the poems in For My People, which, in a Marxist fashion, names religion an enemy of revolution, remarked Collier, Prophets for a New Day"reflects a profound religious faith. The heroes of the sixties are named for the prophets of the Bible: Martin Luther King is Amos, Medgar Evars is Micah, and so on. The people and events of the sixties are paralleled with Biblical characters and occurrences. . . . The religious references are important. Whether one espouses the Christianity in which they are couched is not the issue. For the fact is that Black people from ancient Africa to now have always been a spiritual people, believing in an existence beyond the flesh." One poem in Prophets that harks back to African spiritism is "Ballad of Hoppy Toad" with its hexes that turn a murderous conjurer into a toad. Though Collier felt that Walker's "vision of the African past is fairly dim and romantic," the critic went on to say that this poetry "emanates from a deeper area of the psyche, one which touches the mythic area of a collective being and reenacts the rituals which define a Black collective self." Perhaps more importantly, in all the poems, observed Collier, Walker depicts "a people striking back at oppression and emerging triumphant." 

Much of Walker's responsiveness to the black experience, communicated through the realism of her work, can be attributed to her growing up in a southern home environment that emphasized the rich heritage of black culture. Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, to the Reverend Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker. The family moved to New Orleans when Walker was a young child. A Methodist minister who had been born near Buff Bay, Jamaica, Walker's father was a scholar who bequeathed to his daughter his love of literature--the classics, the Bible, Benedict de Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, the English classics, and poetry. Similarly, Walker's musician mother played ragtime and read poetry to her, choosing among such varied authors and works as Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Greenleaf Whittier's "Snowbound," the Bible, and Shakespeare. At age eleven Walker began reading the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Elvira Ware Dozier, her maternal grandmother, who lived with her family, told Walker stories, including the story of her own mother, a former slave in Georgia. Before she finished college at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the early 1930s, Walker had heard James Weldon Johnson read from God's Trombones (1927), listened to Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes sing in New Orleans, and, in 1932, heard Hughes read his poetry in a lecture recital at New Orleans University, where her parents then taught. She met Hughes in 1932, and he encouraged her to continue writing poetry. Her first poem was published in Crisis in 1934. 

As a senior at Northwestern in 1934, Walker began a fruitful association with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She lived on Chicago's North Side and worked as a volunteer on the WPA recreation project. The project directors assigned her to associate with so-called delinquent girls, mainly shoplifters and prostitutes, in order to determine if Walker's different background and training might have a positive influence on them. She became so fascinated by an Italian-black neighborhood that she eventually chose it as the setting and title for a novel that she began writing (but never published), Goose Island. On Friday, March 13, 1936, Walker received notice to report to the WPA Writer's Project in Chicago as a full-time employee. Classified as a junior writer--her salary was eighty-five dollars a month--her work assignment was the Illinois Guide Book. Other writers on the project were Nelson Algren, Jacob Scher, James Phelan, Sam Ross, Katherine Dunham, Willard Motley, Frank Yerby, Fenton Johnson, and Richard Wright. In 1937 the WPA office allowed her to come into the downtown quarters only twice weekly so that she might remain at home working on her novel. 

Perhaps her most rewarding interaction with a writer at the project was Walker's friendship with Wright, a liaison that, while it lasted, proved practical and beneficial to both fledgling writers. Before she joined the project, Walker had met Wright in Chicago in February, 1936, when he had presided at the writer's section of the first National Negro Congress. Walker had attended solely to meet Hughes again, to show him the poetry she had written since their first meeting four years earlier. Hughes refused to take her only copy of the poems, but he introduced her to Wright and insisted that he include Walker if a writer's group organized. Wright then introduced her to Arna Bontemps and Sterling A. Brown, also writers with the WPA. 

Although Wright left Chicago for New York at the end of May, neither his friendship with Walker nor their literary interdependence ended immediately. Walker provided him, in fact, with important help on Native Son (1940), mailing him--as he requested--newspaper clippings about Robert Nixon, a young black man accused of rape in Chicago, and assisting Wright in locating a vacant lot to use as the Dalton house address when Wright returned to Chicago briefly the next year. Furthermore, Walker was instrumental in acquiring for him a copy of the brief of Nixon's case from attorney Ulysses S. Keyes, the first black lawyer hired for the case. Together, Wright and Walker visited Cook County jail, where Nixon was incarcerated, and the library, where on her library card they checked out a book on Clarence Darrow and two books on the Loeb-Leopold case, from which, in part, Wright modeled Bigger's defense when he completed his novel in the spring of 1939. 

Walker began teaching in the 1940s. She taught at North Carolina's Livingstone College in 1941 and West Virginia State College in 1942. In 1943 she married Firnist James Alexander. In that year, too, she began to read her poetry publicly when she was invited by Arthur P. Davis to read "For My People" at Richmond's Virginia Union University, where he was then teaching. After the birth of the first of her four children in 1944, Walker returned to teach at Livingstone for a year. She also resumed the research on her Civil War novel in the 1940s. She began with a trip to the Schomburg Center in 1942. In 1944 she received a Rosenwald fellowship to further her research. In 1948 Walker was unemployed, living in High Point, North Carolina, and working on the novel. By then she clearly envisioned the development of Jubilee as a folk novel and prepared an outline of incidents and chapter headings, the latter which were supplied by the stories of her grandmother. In 1949 Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and began her long teaching career at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University). 

The fictional history of Walker's great-grandmother, here called Vyry, Jubilee is divided into three sections: the antebellum years in Georgia on John Dutton's plantation, the Civil War years, and the Reconstruction era. Against a panoramic view of history Walker focuses the plot specifically on Vyry's life as she grows from a little girl to adulthood. In the first section Vyry, the slave, matures, marries and separates from Randall Ware, attempts to escape from slavery with her two children, and is flogged. The second section emphasizes the destruction of war and the upheaval for slaveowner and slaves, while the last section focuses on Vyry as a displaced former slave, searching for a home. 

Walker said her research was done "to undergird the oral tradition," and Jubilee is primarily known for its realistic depiction of the daily life and folklore of the black slave community. Although there are also quotes from Whittier and the English romantic poets, she emphasizes the importance of the folk structure of her novel by prefacing each of the fifty-eight chapters with proverbial folk sayings or lines excerpted from spirituals. The narrative is laced with verses of songs sung by Vyry, her guardian, or other slaves. A portion from a sermon is included. The rhymes of slave children are also a part of the narrative. A conjuring episode is told involving the overseer Grimes, suggesting how some folk beliefs were used for protection. Vyry provides a catalogue of herbs and discusses their medicinal and culinary purposes. 

In response to Walker's Civil War story, Guy Davenport commented in National Review that "the novel from end to end is about a place and a people who never existed." For him Walker had merely recalled all the elements of the southern myth, writing a lot of "tushery that comes out of books, out of Yerby and Margaret Mitchell." He further found "something deeply ironic in a Negro's underwriting the made-up South of the romances, agreeing to every convention of the trade." More justly, Chapman in the Saturday Review found "a fidelity to fact and detail" in the depictions of slave life that was better than anything done before. Lester Davis, a contributor to Freedomways, decided that one could overlook the "sometimes trite and often stilted prose style" because the novel is "a good forthright treatment of a segment of American history about which there has been much hypocrisy and deliberate distortion." He found the "flavor of authenticity ... convincing and refreshing. " 

Walker's How I Wrote "Jubilee," a history of the novel's development from her grandmother's oral history, is an indirect response to those critics who comparedJubilee with books like Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) and who accused Walker of sustaining the southern myth from the black perspective. She answers her detractors by citing the references and historical documents she perused over several years in order to gird her oral story with historical fact. 

Walker's volume of poetry Prophets for a New Day was published in 1970. She calledProphets for a New Day her civil rights poems, and only two poems in the volume, "Elegy" and "Ballad of the Hoppy Toad," are not about the civil rights movement. Walker begins the volume with two poems in which the speakers are young children; one eight-year-old demonstrator eagerly waits to be arrested with her group in the fight for equality, and a second one is already jailed and wants no bail. Her point is that these young girls are just as much prophets for a new day as were Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and John Brown. In "The Ballad of the Free" Walker establishes a biblical allusion and association as an integral part of the fight to end racism: "The serpent is loosed and the hour is come / The last shall be first and the first shall be none / The serpent is loosed and the hour is come." 

The title poem, "Prophets for a New Day," and the seven poems that follow it invite obvious comparisons between the biblical prophets and the black leaders who denounced racial injustice and prophesied change during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. For example, several prophets are linked to specific southern cities marked by racial turmoil: in "Jeremiah," the first poem of the series, Jeremiah "is now a man whose names is Benjamin / Brooding over a city called Atlanta / Preaching the doom of a curse upon the land." Among the poems, other prophets mentioned include "Isaiah," "Amos," and "Micah," a poem subtitled "To the memory of Medgar Evers of Mississippi." 

In For My People Walker urged that activity replace complacency, but in Prophets for a New Day she applauds the new day of freedom for black people, focusing on the events, sites, and people of the struggle. Among the poems that recognize southern cities associated with racial turbulence are "Oxford Is a Legend," "Birmingham," "Jackson, Mississippi," and "Sit-Ins." Of these, the latter two, claim reviewers, are the most accomplished pieces. "Sit-Ins" is a recognition of "those first bright young to fling their ... names across pages / Of new Southern history / With courage and faith, convictions, and intelligence."

CAREER

Worked as a social worker, newspaper reporter, and magazine editor; Livingstone College, Salisbury, NC, member of faculty, 1941-42; West Virginia State College, Institute, WV, instructor in English, 1942-43; Livingstone College, professor of English, 1945-46; Jackson State College, Jackson, MS, professor beginning 1949, professor emeritus of English, director of Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black Peoples, 1968--. Lecturer, National Concert and Artists Corp. Lecture Bureau, 1943-48. Visiting professor in creative writing, Northwestern University, spring, 1969. Staff member, Cape Cod Writers Conference, Craigville, MA, 1967 and 1969. Participant, Library of Congress Conference on the Teaching of Creative Writing, 1973.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• For My People, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1942.
• Ballad of the Free, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1966.
• Prophets for a New Day, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1970.
• October Journey, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1973.
• This Is My Century, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1989.

PROSE

• Jubilee (novel), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1965.
• How I Wrote "Jubilee," Third World Press (Chicago, IL), 1972.
• (With Nikki Giovanni) A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker, Howard University Press (Washington, DC), 1974.
• Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, Dodd (New York, NY), 1987.
• How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, edited by Maryemma Graham, Feminist Press at The City University of New York (New York, NY), 1990.
• On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-1992, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 1997.
• Conversations with Margaret Walker, edited by Maryemma Graham, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MI), 2002.

OTHER

• Contributor to Black Expression, edited by Addison Gayle, Weybright & Tally (New York, NY), 1969; Many Shades of Black, edited by Stanton L. Wormley and Lewis H. Fenderson, Morrow (New York, NY), 1969; Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Morrow (New York, NY), 1973, and The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1999.
• Also contributor to numerous anthologies, including Adoff's Black Out Loud, Weisman and Wright's Black Poetry for All Americans, and Williams' Beyond the Angry Black. Contributor of articles to periodicals includingMississippi Folklore Register and Southern Quarterly.

FURTHER READING

BOOKS

• African American Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2nd edition, 2000, volume 2, pp. 759-771.
• Bankier, Joanna, and Dierdre Lashgari, editors, Women Poets of the World, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1983.
• Baraka, Amiri, The Black Nation, Getting Together Publications, 1982.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1976.
• Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.
• Davis, Arthur P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960, Howard University Press (Washington, DC), 1974.
• Emanuel, James A., and Theodore L. Gross, editors, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, Free Press (New York, NY), 1968.
• Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Anchor/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1982.
• Gayle, Addison, editor, The Black Aesthetic, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1971.
• Gibson, Donald B., editor, Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1983.
• Henderson, Ashyia, editor, Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 29, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.
• Jackson, Blyden, and Louis D. Rubin Jr., Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation,Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1974.
• Jones, John Griffith, in Mississippi Writers Talking, Volume II, University of Mississippi Press (Jackson, MS), 1983.
• Kent, George E., Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture, Third World Press (Chicago, IL), 1972.
• Lee, Don L., Dynamite Voices I: Black Poets of the 1960s, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1971.
• Miller, R. Baxter, editor, Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 1986.
• Mitchell, Angelyn, editor, Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1994.
• Modern Black Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2nd edition, 1999, pp. 758-762.
• Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers, editors, Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition,Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1985.
• Redmond, Eugene B., Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry-A Critical Evaluation, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1976.
• Tate, Claudia, editor, Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1983.
• Walker, Margaret, How I Wrote "Jubilee," Third World Press (Chicago, IL), 1972.
• Whitlow, Roger, Black American Literature: A Critical History, Nelson Hall, 1973.

PERIODICALS

• African American Review, summer, 1993, Jerry W. Ward Jr., "Black South Literature: Before Day Annotations (for Blyden Jackson)," p. 315.
• Atlantic Monthly, December, 1942.
• Black World, December, 1971; December, 1975.
• Booklist, July, 1997, Alice Joyce, review of On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-1992, p. 1794; February 15, 1998, Brad Hooper, review of Jubilee, p. 979.
• Book Week, October 2, 1966.
• Callaloo, May, 1979.
• Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 1942; September 29, 1966; June 19, 1974; January 22, 1990, Laurel Shaper, "One woman's world of words; 'Jubilee' author draws on her racial experience to craft works of concern and compassion".
• CLA Journal, December, 1977.
• Ebony, February, 1949.
• Freedomways, summer, 1967.
• Library Journal, November 1, 1989, Fred Muratori, review of This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems, p. 92; January 1990, Molly Brodsky, review of Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, p. 110; June 15, 1997, Ann Burns, review of On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-1992, p. 69.
• Mississippi Quarterly, fall, 1988; fall, 1989.
• National Review, October 4, 1966.
• Negro Digest, February, 1967; January, 1968.
• New Republic, November 23, 1942.
• New York Times, November 4, 1942.
• New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1942; September 25, 1966.
• Publishers Weekly, April 15, 1944; March 24, 1945.
• Saturday Review, September 24, 1966.
• Times Literary Supplement, June 29, 1967.
• Washington Post, February 9, 1983.
• Yale Review, winter, 1943.

ONLINE

• Internet Poetry Archive, http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/walker/ (October 24, 2003).
• Modern American Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ (October 27, 2003).
• University of Mississippi, http://www.olemiss.edu/ (April 17, 2003), Jon Tucker, "Margaret Walker Alexander."
• Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color, http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ (December 9, 1999), Danye A. Pelichet, Shanese Baylor, and Kinitra D. Brooks, "Dr. Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander."

OBITUARIES

• African American Review, spring, 1999, p. 5.
• Chicago Tribune, December 6, 1998, p. 8.
• Current Biography, June, 1999, p. 62.
• Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1998, p. A24.
• New York Times, December 4, 1998, p. A29.
• Washington Post, December 1, 1998, p. B6.

>via: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/margaret-walker

Emeli Sande performs for

Yahoo’s New Now series 

DeeKay June 6, 2012

The amazing Emeli Sande continues her assault on America with a typically impressive acoustic session for Yahoo’s “New Now” series. Her debut album Our Version of Events dropped over in the States yesterday and here she discusses starting out as a singer, hearing the likes of Anita Baker, Nina Simone (who had a real formative influence on her), Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey via her father and where she sees her future.

Watch the performances below.
LISTEN: “My Kind of Love”

 

LISTEN: “Next To Me”

 

 

LISTEN: “Daddy”

 

 

Seeking Young African Thinkers

in Journalism and the Arts:

Ted Fellows Program 2013

Deadline: 13 July 2012

The TED Fellows program is designed to bring together young world-changers and trailblazers who have shown unusual accomplishment and exceptional courage. The program targets individuals from the Asia/Pacific region, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East, though anyone from anywhere in the world, age 18 and over, is welcome to apply.

Forty Fellows will be recruited each year. Of those Fellows, roughly 10 will be selected for the extended, two-year Senior Fellows program. Read more about how it works »

BENEFITS TO FELLOWS

• Attendance to one TED or TEDGlobal Conference with all expenses paid (conference, travel, room and board)
• Participation in Fellows pre-conference activities
• Private social networking on TED.com
• Potential to speak on the TED Fellows or TED University stage
• Potential to have that talk posted on TED.com
• Participation in the SupporTED coaching program

RESPONSIBILITIES OF FELLOWS

• Full attendance and participation at the Conference
• Submission of a post-conference report
• Regular participation in the TED Fellows community

ADDITIONAL BENEFITS TO SENIOR FELLOWS

• Attendance to four additional TED and TEDGlobal Conferences with all expenses paid (travel, room and board)
• Participation in four additional Senior Fellows-centered pre-conference activities
• Potential to deliver a full-length talk on the main stage
• Potential to have that TEDTalk posted online

ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF SENIOR FELLOWS

• Full attendance and participation at four additional TED or TEDGlobal Conferences over two years
• Submission of a post-conference report after each conference
• Regular posting on the TED Fellows Blog
• Hosting a TEDx event for 50+ people
• Giving a talk on the TED Fellows, TED University or main TED stage

WHO SHOULD APPLY

We are looking for an eclectic, heterogeneous group of young thinkers and doers from the fields of technology, entertainment, design, the sciences, engineering, humanities, the arts, economics, business, journalism, entrepreneurship and NGOs.

At TED, we can take risks on unconventional innovators. We value achievement over credentials -- making and doing over merely talking.

We are targeting applicants of ages 21-40 from five target regions: Africa, Asia/Pacific, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East. However, anyone over the age 18 from around the world is welcome to apply.

HOW TO APPLY

To apply to become a TED Fellow, please complete the application form in its entirety. (Before beginning the application, please review our applications tips and our terms and conditions.)

In addition to basic details and contact information, the application asks applicants to answer essay questions and provide three references. Applications must be received complete and on time to be considered.

The application cycles for TED and TEDGlobal are different. Applicants apply to one conference.

THE SELECTION PROCESS

TED Fellows are selected by the program staff.

Once a year, an international selection committee meets to select the TED Senior Fellows for the following year.

The selection committee is comprised of people who represent the breadth of interest and achievement that makes up the TED community. Committee members bring experiences from various fields and come from countries representing our target regions. Selections are made by the group as a whole, not by individuals.

Links: application tips, program FAQ, terms and conditions

CONTACT INFORMATION:

For queries: fellows@ted.com

For submissions: via the online application form

Website: http://www.ted.com