Miriam Makeba
‘Mama Africa,’ the film
January 20, 2012 By
We suspect there’s a good chance this video would have been taken down by now if the proposed #SOPA law would have been passed. But since #SOPA’s not here yet: it is a recording (and an edited-down version) of the 2011 documentary by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki about the life of Miriam Makeba.
Watch Trailer For
Indie Drama "Greencastle"
About Lonely Widowed
Single Father in Rural Town
Video by Vanessa Martinez | January 21, 2012Described as a "quirky off-beat drama," Greencastle is written and directed by Koran Dunbar, who is also the lead actor in the film. The film, about a single father in a rural town in PA grieving the death of his late wife, was able to raise post-production costs through Kickstarter last month.
After taking a look at the trailer, I found it refreshing to see a racially diverse cast, which, besides Dunbar lists Nikki Estridge, Aurelius Dunbar, Doua Moua and Christopher James Raynor.
Here's the full synopsis:
"Greencastle" is a quirky offbeat drama about man’s search for meaning amidst the ache of despair chronicles Poitier, a single father who works as an Assistant Manager at a small town pet shop, as he enters a "quarter-life crisis" impelled by a recent tragedy. Greencastle intertwines lives of loneliness and disconnection, fatefully leading Poitier toward an unexpected and sublime awakening.
Glancing through Koran Dunbar's IMDB, Greencastle seems to be his first writing/directing/producing effort; he does have a couple of recent acting credits in supporting roles.
Going by the recent updates in the film's Facebook page HERE, it looks like the film has been submitted to a few film festivals this year.
Take a look a the trailer below; I've also embedded a first-look video underneath it, in which the cast and crew discuss the film.
Inside the secret industry
of inmate-staffed
call centers
WNYT-TV / Inmates at Greene Correctional Institution in Coxsackie, N.Y., staff a state Department of Motor Vehicles call center.
When you call a company or government agency for help, there's a good chance the person on the other end of the line is a prison inmate.
The federal government calls it "the best-kept secret in outsourcing" — providing inmates to staff call centers and other services in both the private and public sectors.
The U.S. government, through a 75-year-old program called Federal Prison Industries, makes about $750 million a year providing prison labor, federal records show. The great majority of those contracts are with other federal agencies for services as diverse as laundry, construction, data conversion and manufacture of emergency equipment.
But the program also markets itself to businesses under a different name, Unicor, providing commercial market and product-related services. Unicor made about $10 million from "other agencies and customers" in the first six months of fiscal year 2011 (the most recent period for which official figures are available), according to an msnbc.com analysis of its sales records.
The Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons don't break down which companies they do business with. But Unicor said inmates provide private call center service, including data review and sales lead generation, for "some of the top companies in America" under a federal mandate to help companies repatriate jobs they have outsourced overseas.
In a fact sheet, Unicor asserts that prisoners in the program are less likely to re-offend and are better trained for full-time work upon release. All revenue goes back into the program, which "operates at no cost to the taxpayer," it says.
The idea has filtered down to some of the states, among them Georgia, Arizona and New York.
When New York residents call the Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, they might get an inmate at Greene Correctional Institution in Coxsackie, near Albany, or at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women near White Plains, on the border with Connecticut.
"Obviously, it saves taxpayer dollars," Brian Fischer, commissioner of the state Corrections and Community Supervision Department, told NBC station WNYT of Albany. "Number two, it provides what we call a transferable skill."
Besides saving the state money, said Elizabeth Glazer, the state's deputy secretary for public safety, the program is "an investment in our state's overall safety."
"When we help offenders build the workforce skills necessary to find viable employment after incarceration, we lessen the chances they will reoffend and end up back in the state's prison system," she said.
The corrections department acknowledged that callers aren't told they're talking to a state prisoner. But they stressed that callers are protected — no personal information is displayed to the prisoners, who don't have access to computers, officials said.
In the private sector, states usually partner with business-to-business firms to run the services — the companies provide the equipment and facilities, and the state provides the labor. One such firm is Televerde, a Phoenix company that partners with the Arizona prison system to provide marketing services for major companies that have included Hitachi and Microsoft.
In a marketing paper, Microsoft says companies like Televerde "can reduce the burden on corporate marketing and local marketing teams can have more meaningful interactions with their customers." (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News.)
"It allows me the opportunity to speak to different people of different nationalities, regardless of what ethnicity, and it makes me feel like 'Wow, I can do better,'" he said.
Read the original story at WNYT.com
But Danny Donohue president of the New York Civil Service Employees Association, criticized the program for prioritizing marketable skills for prisoners over providing jobs to "law-abiding citizens."
It's "a bad idea generally and even worse considering the current economy," Donohue said.
By M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com and Bill Lambdin of WNYT-TV in Albany, N.Y. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.
Western Oil Firms
Big Winners In Iraq
By Sherwood Ross
19 January, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Western oil producers have emerged as the big winners of the Iraq war.
“Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil market,” industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera wire service. “But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973.”
“Western producers like BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell are enjoying their
best access to Iraq’s southern oil fields since 1972,” Business Week noted in its issue of March 4th of last year. (1972 was the year
Saddam Hussein nationalized Iraq’s oil fields.)Business Week quotes Andy Inglis, BP’s chief executive for exploration
and production as saying, “We see this as the beginning of a long-term
relationship with Iraq and will continue to look for further
opportunities.”Dr. Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum, an international oil consultant and economist, agrees the western firms have won contracts despite “a lack of transparency and clarity of vision regarding the legal issues.” The
Iraqi government “gave a little piece of the cake for China and some
of the other countries and companies to keep them silent.”A group led by BP will receive $2 billion per year to develop Iraq’s
Rumalia field and a Shell-led group is to get $913 million per year.
An Exxon-led group is to get $1.6 billion per year, Bloomberg News
reports. Each calculation is based on the agreed-to per-barrel fee
times the maximum production level, Bloomberg explains.David Bender, a Middle East analyst at Eurasia Group, Washington,
D.C., told Bloomberg, “Iraq is one of the most attractive oil markets
in the world. The international oil companies may feel that getting in
at the beginning improves their long-term prospects.”The only area of Iraq where oil firms fare better than fee-for-service
work is in the northern Kurdish autonomous region(KRG) where
businesses including Norway’s DNO International ASA are pumping crude under production-sharing agreements “not recognized by the central government,” Bloomberg reports.It also turns out Hunt Oil Co., of Dallas, Tex., clinched a separate
deal in Sept., 2007, with Iraq Kurdistan Regional Government. Hunt
might not have won if its chief officer, Ray Hunt, was not President
George W. Bush’s friend and a major fund-raiser. Some folks think,
according to a front page New York Times report July 3, 2008, the deal
“runs counter to American policy and undercut Iraq’s central
government.” Apparently, Bush didn’t think so. Baghdad reportedly is
furious over it.Hunt got this free pass to explore Kurdistan’s oil riches in Sept., 2007, when it inked an exploration pact likely to give the firm a share of the boodle of any future gushers. “Hunt would be the first U.S. company to sign such a deal,” a State Department official told the New York Times. And according to reporter Jay Price of McClatchy News Service, the Iraqi oil minister, speaking for Baghdad, “called the Hunt deal illegal.”
A State Department cable dated Sept. 12, 2007, and made public by
Wikileaks, “detailed official warnings from the U.S. government that
the contract, regardless of lease location, is legally risky due to unresolved land and oil disputes between Baghdad and the KRG---and that such a contract could further amplify conflicts between the
central and regional governments,” wrote Ben Lando of the authoritative “Iraq Oil Report” Aug. 25, 2011. Hunt seemingly would not have to press Bush hard for the insider’s deal.
Juhasz says that ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell aggressively lobbied their
governments “to ensure that the invasion would result in an Iraq open
to foreign oil companies” and that “they succeeded.”She added that the U.S. and western oil companies and their
governments has been lobbying for a new national Iraq Oil Law that
would largely privatize the oil market along the lines of the old
Production Sharing Agreements---although such PSA’s have been rejected in most countries because they provide “far more benefits to the
foreign corporation than to the domestic government.” Hunt’s deal with
KRG was of the PSA sort.“The public is against privatization,” Juhasz told al-Jazeera, “which
is one reason the (Iraqi Oil Law) has not passed. The contracts are
enacting a form of privatisation without public discourse and essentially at the butt of a gun. These contracts have all been awarded during a foreign military occupation with the largest contracts going to companies from the foreign occupiers’ countries. It seems that democracy and equity are the two largest losers in this oil battle.”Note: the Obama regime “continues to pressure Baghdad to pass the Iraq Oil Law” over the wishes of the majority of the Iraqi people. “Thus
far,” Juhasz said, “it has required a massive foreign military invasion and occupation to grant the foreign oil companies the access they have thus far garnered.”Meanwhile, back at the pump, the boost in oil supplies has not reduced
the price of oil being extracted from American motorists. The laws of
supply and demand no longer appear to be working. According to
business writer John Egan of Technorati, the average price for a gallon of gas last Feb. 26th climbed to $3.33, compared with $2.70 the
previous year. And wire service Agency France Presse(AFP) reports in
the Waynesville, Va., Augusta Free Press that “Average U.S. gasoline
prices began 2012 just under $3.28 gal, the highest number ever to
mark the beginning of a year and the fifth straight weekly increase in
price.”As for the profit-taking of the big oil firms, Egan on Feb. 26, 2011,
wrote: “While we’re paying more to fill up, the three largest publicly
traded oil companies based in the United States have been filling up
on profits. Those three companies – ExxonMobil, Chevron and
ConocoPhillips – collectively pulled in an eye-popping $58.3 billion
in profits in 2010, according to financial figures announced in
January 2011. Mind you, that’s profit – the amount of money that
companies pocket after covering their expenses.”Gas prices reached the point last year that, according to “The
Washington Post” of last April 30th, President Obama “blasted oil
companies for enjoying gangbuster profits while pump prices surged to
nearly $4 a gallon this week, and he again urged Congress to end $4
billion a year in subsidies for the oil and gas industry.”“When oil companies are making huge profits and you’re struggling at
the pump, and we’re scouring the federal budget for spending we can
afford to do without, these tax giveaways aren’t right,” Obama said.
“They aren’t smart. And we need to end them,” the president added.And Greg Palast points out in his book, “Armed Madhouse”(Plume), the
oil majors are not simply passive resellers of OPEC production but
have reserves of their own which rise in tandem with oil prices.“The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the (Iraq) war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil Oil alone by just over $666-billion,” Palast wrote. What’s more, Chevron Oil, “where (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice had served as a director, gained a quarter trillion dollars in value.”
Iraq’s experience mirrors the prior overthrow in 1953 of the Iranian
government by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. This is recounted
in “An Enemy of The People”(Doukathsan) by Lawrence Velvel, dean of
the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. He notes that after CIA
Mideast Operations Chief Kermit Roosevelt created a state of anarchy
in Iran that toppled the elected government, the U.S. oil companies
cashed in.“Our oil companies---Gulf, Standard of New Jersey, Texaco and
Mobil---received a 40 percent share of the new National Iranian Oil Co., and the shah established a tyrannical dictatorship, with the dreaded Savak (secret police) doing dirty work for him,” Velvel writes. By the way, it may be noted that Iran in 1953 could not be said to have the beginning of any nuclear weapon development as to constitute a threat to Israel or any other country.So what was the 1953 overthrow of Iran all about if not oil? The pattern that has emerged over the past 60 years is that the Pentagon/CIA have bullied their way into seizing the oil fields of the Middle East, from which Western oil companies just happened to enrich themselves. The history of past events in Iran and Iraq casts a dubious light on the contemporary claims of U.S. politicians today that Iran represents a mortal danger to Israel. The CIA overthrow of Iran and the Pentagon attack on Iraq reveal it's all about oil.
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant who
advises colleges, universities, magazines, and entrepreneurial
businesses
Red Tails Overlooks
the Story of
America’s First Black Pilots
Jan 16, 2012George Lucas’s new film, Red Tails, celebrates famous African-American fighter pilots, but Marc Wortman tells the little known story of America’s first black aviators—and how they took to the sky against impossible odds.
BY Marc Wortman
Red Tails, George Lucas’s airborne shoot-‘em-up about World War II’s famed black fighter pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, premieres on Jan. 20. Judging from the trailers and the director’s comments to the press, he’s remade Star Wars over Nazi Berlin. A group of raffish but big-hearted outsiders fight their way through bad blood and doubters on the ground to lead the aerial dogfight against the evil empire. Filmgoers may be forgiven for expecting a climactic airborne mano-à-mano with Darth Vader—I mean Hitler.
The good news is that a new generation will learn that courageous African-American pilots flew and fought not only against the Nazis but their own country’s racism. What the movie won’t show is that long before the Red Tails took wing, black aviators were already smashing through the color barrier in the sky—on their own terms. It’s a worthy story in its own right.Within a decade of the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight, in 1912, a Pennsylvanian named Emory Malick unknowingly began apattern by having to go all the way to Southern California before he could find somebody willing to teach a black person how to fly. He became the first African-American to earn a pilot’s license. But after Malick, doors for black aviators slammed shut. American flight instructors and licensing agencies refused to let another African-American fly with their support for the next decade and a half, and so they needed to invent other ways to work around those who would keep them grounded. Eugene Bullard went to France and, in World War I, flew for the Lafayette Escadrille, the all-American squadron fighting for the French. He painted the words “Tout le sang qui coule est rouge!”—“All blood runs red”—on his fuselage. Not so for America’s military once it joined the war. No matter how desperate its need for experienced combat pilots, the U.S. refused to let Bullard fly.
Red Tails, George Lucas’s airborne shoot-‘em-up about World War II’s famed black fighter pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, premieres on January 20., LucasFilm LTD
Shortly after the Armistice, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, a Trinidadian living in Montreal, fell in love with both the thrill of flight and the pilot’s heroic image. He found a willing Canadian instructor. Moving to Harlem, he specialized in high altitude stunts, including the time he parachuted in a flaming red devil jumpsuit onto a crowded 140th Street.
In 1924, three years prior to Lindbergh’s flight, he attempted to become the first person to solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Julien made it from the New York’s East River to Flushing Bay. “When it crashed it crashed hard,” mocked the New Yorker in a 1931 profile.
Julien had trouble competing in the flamboyance category with his occasional air show mate, Bessie Coleman. Tiny, pretty, and daring, Coleman merited frequent comparison to her white contemporary “aviatrix,” Amelia Earhart. Unable to find an instructor willing to train her, she, too, went to France, getting an international pilot’s license in 1921 even before Earhart.
Back home, “Queen Bess” found fame as a daredevil stunt pilot and parachute jumper. The black community adored her. The white press couldn’t resist the novelty of a black woman pilot. “NEGRESS PILOTS AIRPLANE,” a New York Times headline proclaimed in amazement. Coleman claimed with some justification that she was “the most known colored person other than jazz singers.”
Her vision went beyond her love of flying and aerial stunts. She believed that opening the new and seemingly limitless sky to blacks could transcend the racism that poisoned the ground below. She wanted, she said, to transform “Uncle Tom’s cabin into a hangar.” She refused to participate in segregated air shows and raised money to open a flight school for blacks in L.A. In 1926, while rehearsing for a benefit show for the school, Queen Bess fell from the cockpit five hundred feet to her death.
They flew in a rickety, underpowered biplane and carried just $25 in their pockets. The “Flying Hobos” figured they would bum fuel and provisions along the way.
One of the people Coleman inspired was Chicago businessman William Powell. When no instructor anywhere near Chicago would teach the decorated war veteran to fly, he sold off a successful auto garage chain and moved to L.A. where, in 1929, he found a flight school more interested in the color of his money than his skin.
The visionary Powell soon gathered together most of the nation’s tiny pool of black aviators in an attempt to fulfill Coleman’s dream. They offered free flight instruction and other courses in aeronautics to all comers. The group’s all-black air circuses thrilled tens of thousands of spectators.
America tried to close off the sky to African-Americans, but together they were flying over the Whites Only signs. But one tantalizing aerial mark seemed beyond reach. After three decades of motorized flight, no black aviator had managed to fly coast-to-coast. Few whites believed that blacks had the right stuff to tackle tricky and arduous long-distance flights. What they really lacked was money.
In late September 1932, James Herman Banning and Thomas Allen, both part of Powell’s group, took off from a dusty airfield in sight of the Pacific Ocean. They flew in a rickety, underpowered biplane and carried just $25 in their pockets. The “Flying Hobos” figured they would bum fuel and provisions along the way. Within a few flight legs, though, they were broke.
Then something extraordinary happened.
Banning and Allen charted their course by choosing towns with large black populations. They knocked on the doors of black-owned businesses and spoke at black churches, YMCAs, and even pool halls. People with barely enough money to feed themselves took up collections. Families offered beds and meals. Shop classes overhauled their engine. The national network of black newspapers began to report on their progress. Larger and larger crowds, black and white, turned out to greet the men at each successive airfield.
The pair of aviation pioneers became icons with whom, declared the famed black sociologist and civil-rights leader W.E.B. DuBois, a “race soars upward, on the wings of an aeroplane.”
It took them just 41 hours and 37 minutes of flying time but 21 days to complete their 3,300-mile flight to New York—no faster than the very first cross-country flight two decades earlier. But little matter. They had done what the white world said was impossible, flying beyond the reach of prejudice, above the barriers of segregation.
The Red Tails may make for a rousing Star Wars-meets-Flying Leathernecks action movie. Even without dogfight scenes the wider story of how African Americans shot down race barriers is every bit as dramatic and inspiring.
Until Hollywood figures that out, there’s a comprehensive traveling Smithsonian exhibition titled Black Wings making its way around the country, and the Smithsonian Cable Network channel just premiered a new documentary of the same name.
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Marc Wortman is the author of The Millionaires' Unit and The Bonfire. He is writing a book on the events of the year leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II. For more on him, go to marcwortmanbooks.com.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Premiere:
K'NAAN f/ Nas
"Nothing To Lose"
By Jacob Moore | Jan 19, 2012It's been a minute since we've heard from K'NAAN, but the Somali-Canadian rapper behind the 2010 World Cup anthem is back, and he's got some company. For "Nothing To Lose," K'naan grabs Nas to join in over the minimalistic production laced with a sing-along chorus.
This one's off the upcoming EP, More Beautiful Than Silence, set to drop on January 24 on A&M/Octone. The EP will warm listeners up and get fans ready for the full-length album, coming soon after. Listen to the track via the lyrics video above, and check out the cover art and tracklist to the More Beautiful Than Silence EP below:
K'NAAN More Beautiful Than Silence
1. "Is Anybody Out There" (ft. Nelly Furtado)
2. "Nothing to Lose" (ft. Nas)
3. "More Beautiful Than Silence"
4. "Better"
5. "Coming to America"
"Colored People’s
Time Machine"
by Gabriel Teodros
When interviewing afropolitans, I tend to begin with the question: ‘What is your concept of home?’ Gabriel Teodros answers this question on his sophomore album, Colored People’s Time Machine. The album is a journey through the life of the Seattle born-and-raised Ethiopian-American artist and community activist. It’s a multi-lingual, multi-genre, multi-cultural journey that is chronicled through a variety of diverse lenses and voices.
A curly haired mixed kid raised in Seattle’s South End and Central District, Teodros carved his identity with and between Black music and old-school activists, Mexican and South-East Asian gangs, First Nations Community, a group of Filipino poets, a Chinese landlord and an Ethiopian family he met at the airport as they emigrated to the United States. Teodros calls it "a berbere, tapatio and wasabi mix…we’re making injera, and there’s some kim-chee in the fridge.”
This is certainly reflected in this latest effort, particularly with the diverse group of artists with which he collaborates. The album features vocal, instrumental, and production collaborations with 20 artists as culturally and ethnically diverse as Teodros’ neighbourhood.
On the album, he weaves together the variety of rich cultural influences that form the tapestry of his identity. He explores themes of love (Goodnight, a brief interlude on a long-distance relationship), cultural identity (Blossoms of Fire), personal identity (Alien Native, a biographical tale), the concept of home (Diaspora and Beit), loss (Ella Mable Bright, a tribute to his beloved grandmother feat. fellow Ethiopian-American Meklit Hadero), music (Sun and Breeze, also feat. Meklit Hadero and Amos Miller, and Colored People’s Time Machine), and the music industry (You A Star, on which he warns about the pitfalls of the industry and the danger of buying into the illusion of stardom).
Stand-out tracks include Alien Native, on which Teodros collaborates with fellow social activist and trumpeter, Sonny Singh. The result is a jazz-heavy, poignant personal tale of discovering one’s identity and coming to terms with the inevitable conflicts that arise in a family of various cultures and races: ‘I was raised alienated/native to none/sacred to some/places I’m from/we can never go back/ I’m proud of my background’.
Sun and Breeze, on which the blend of Hadero’s voice and Teodros’ flow is perfection itself.
And Saturn’s Return (featuring featuring okanomodé, Cristina Orbé & Maya Jenkins), a powerful and vulnerable recounting of his very personal struggle and growth as an person and as an artist, on which he talks about losing and regaining faith in self: ‘I had to be broke into pieces so I could be open to grow into who I’m supposed to’…’I am so undone, unactualized…but closer to seeing my purpose in life.’
Musically, the album blends genres effortlessly, and is cleverly produced. It is captivating and smooth-flowing, and never loses its rhythm.
Teodros describes his musical journey as ‘a constant process/unraveling/you call it hip hop/I call it Colored People’s Time Machine’. And he has taken a beautifully collaborative approach to telling his story. A well-crafted, thoughtful, insightful ode to all the people, experiences, places, that have made him who he is today. To borrow a phrase from Lauryn Hill, Colored People’s Time Machine is ‘a well written thesis broken down into pieces.’
So what is his concept of home? As described in various tracks: ‘home is not a place’; ‘home is not a house’; ‘home is an embrace’; ‘home is an a verse’.CPTY is out on February 19 on Fresh Chopped Beats/MADK Productions. It is available for pre-order HERE.
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The Red Mountain Prize for Poetry will award publication of a full-length book of poetry. The most important criterion is that the manuscript manifest interesting themes in beautiful, strong, and evocative language. The winner will receive publication with our standard contract and a two week residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The residency will include opportunities for an intensive critique, occasions to become acquainted with the vibrant, diverse and extensive Santa Fe poetry community, and, subject to scheduling requirements, a reading in Santa Fe. All submissions will be considered for possible future publication. |
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Call For Entries
Calling all indie book authors and publishers - including small presses, mid-size independent publishers, university presses, e-book publishers, and self-published authors.
Entries are now being accepted for the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards (the "Indie Book Awards"), the most exciting and rewarding book awards program open to independent publishers and authors worldwide who have a book written in English and released in 2011 or 2012 or with a 2011 or 2012 copyright date. The Indie Book Awards is presented by Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group (www.IBPPG.com).
With 60 categories to choose from, enter by February 24, 2012 (all books must be received in our offices by February 24, 2012) to take advantage of this exciting opportunity to have your book considered for cash prizes, awards, exposure, possible representation by a leading literary agent, and recognition as one of the top independently published books of the year!
Awards given to the Finalists and Winners of the 2012 Indie Book Awards are:
- $1,500 Cash Prize and trophy awarded to the best Fiction Book
- $1,500 Cash Prize and trophy awarded to the best Non-Fiction Book
- $750 Cash Prize and trophy awarded to the second best Fiction Book
- $750 Cash Prize and trophy awarded to the second best Non-Fiction Book
- $500 Cash Prize and trophy awarded to the third best Fiction Book
- $500 Cash Prize and trophy awarded to the third best Non-Fiction Book
- $250 Cash Prize and trophy awarded to the Best Design Book entry
- $100 Cash Prize and a Gold Medal awarded to the winner of each of the 60 categories
- Finalist Medals will be awarded to up to four finalists in each of the 60 categories
Click here to find out what else the Finalists and Winners of the 2012 Indie Book Awards will receive.
Kenya @ 100 Short Story
and Essay Contest
Written by Mwandishi
Nsemia Inc. Publishers announces 2063: Kenya @ 100 Short Story and Essay Contest that will run in the months of December 2011 and January 2012. The contest intends to task writers’ imagination and thought to paint a picture of the country at 100 years of age.
Predicting the future has its dangers, but writers are encouraged to take creative license and imagine the journey to the 100th birthday of the country: its socio-economics, politics/freedoms, urban/rural society, pastoral/farming/working life, the family, relationships, marriage, divorce, births, deaths, child/ health care,, education system, science/research/technology/inventions; the young/old, name it! Think of how Kenya would have changed and the society that it would become.
Writers are free to choose their style of presentation (persuasive, comparative, descriptive, narrative or otherwise) dictated by scenes, events, places, personalities, conditions and the like. Writers’ aim is to tell an interesting, logical story that grips readers’ attention. Preference will be given to short stories and essays that are believable with high creative elements, readable, and able to hold the interest of the reader; stories that paint a comprehensive picture the state of life of the time.
The awards for the winning five submissions are $1000, $750, $500, $250 and $100, respectively. In addition the top five winners will be offered publishing contracts for book-length versions of their essays and short stories. The next 20 essays will be published in an anthology 2063: Kenya at 100 Perspectives. We are actively seeking sponsors to broaden the award categories as such more awards will be announced as we get respective sponsors.
The contest report will be published as a book of between 100 and 150 pages, featuring the top 25 contestant profiles and abstracts of their short stories and essays. Other report content will include a historical background of Kenya and developments to date, highlighting major milestones in the making of the Kenyan nation.
Further, the report will have a short history the Kenyan literary scene and ongoing trends; and opinions on the future of Kenyan literature in the face of globalization. A few chosen works from the Kenyan literary scene and (where relevant) from outside the country will be featured.
There is limited advertising space for organizations, businesses and individuals wishing to advertise in the contest report.
Opportunities for participation include being a sponsor, a contestant or a judge/reviewer.
Proposed categories for sponsorship include Top Female Contestant; Top Contestant Under 18 ; Top Urban Contestant; Top Urban Contestant Over 18 ; Top Contestant from rural Kenya; Top Contestant from the Diaspora ; Top Contestant from the Diaspora under 18; Top Male Contestant over 65 years and Top Female Contestant Over 65 years; Top Contestant on the subject of the girl child
Interested parties can get further information including contest rules (click here to download contest rules) and entry form (click hereto download the entry form), sponsorship information, advertising and entry form from kenya2063@nsemia.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
The contest closes on January 31st, 2012.
