Project 60: E. Ethelbert Miller, the Making of an African American Writer

Posted by Jennifer Kinniff at Nov 02, 2010 03:00 PM | Permalink

Please join the Special Collections Research Center at the Gelman Library of The George Washington University on November 19, 2010 for a celebration honoring D.C. poet E. Ethelbert Miller. The celebration, which coincides with Miller’s 60th birthday, will include discussion and comments by Ethelbert and his family and friends about his journey as a writer, as well as an examination and assessment of his work and a poetry reading with Sandra Beasley, Naomi Ayala, Ken Carroll, and Brian Gilmore. Accompanying the event is the exhibit “Call and Response,” which explores Miller’s life, major works, and their impact on those around him, both inside and outside the writing community.

E. Ethelbert Miller. Photo by Julia Jones.

 

The Project 60 event is a joint program of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Special Collections Research Center.  The program begins at 1:30 PM in room 207 in Gelman Library and continues through the evening. For a complete schedule of the day’s activities, visit:  http://www.gwu.edu/gelman/spec/EEM_PROGRAM.pdf

Since 1974, Ethelbert Miller has served as the Director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. This position and his numerous literary and political activities in the Washington writing community have afforded him the opportunity to develop his own talent and to influence and nurture emerging African American artists. Ethelbert is an accomplished author, teacher, editor, and mentor. His poetry publications include among others How We Sleep On the Nights We Don't Make Love; Whispers, Secrets, and Promises; First Light: New and Selected Poems; Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators?; Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain: Poems 1975-1980; and The Migrant Worker. Ethelbert is also an accomplished editor.  His editorial work has included many anthologies, including In Search of Color Everywhere: a Collection of African American Poetry; Women surviving massacres and men: nine women poets: an anthology; and with Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Synergy D.C. anthology. He has penned two memoirs, Fathering Words: the Making of an African American Writer and The 5th Inning. Ethelbert is the founder and Director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area.

Ethelbert Miller’s connections to the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) are significant and far-reaching.   In 1984, Miller and performance artist Chasen Gaver promoted the idea of a Washington Writers’ Archive with a goal to collect the literary papers of the writing community in D.C., especially those of artists who focused their work on the issues of concern to residents of Washington.  Since then, subsequent partnerships between local poets and SCRC archivists have resulted in the beginnings of a comprehensive community history, including the papers of Miller himself, that will capture the intersections between members of a community of artists who interact both personally and artistically.

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Photo by: Dafna Steinberg

"Divine Love"

Divine Love 

 (For Alexs & SooJin) 


I wish I had loved you many years ago
I would have loved you like Ellington loved Jazz and Bearden loved scissors.
I would have loved you like Langston loved Harlem and the Blues loved Muddy Waters.
I would have loved you like Douglass loved to read and Garvey loved parades.
I would have loved you like Zora loved stories and DuBois loved suits.
I would have loved you like Lewis boxing and Mahalia loved to sing.
I would have loved you like Carver loved peanuts and Wheatley loved poems.
I would have loved you like Jimmy loved Lorraine and Ossie loved Ruby...
I would have loved you like King loved Jesus and Malcolm loved Allah

E.Ethelbert Miller

Video by Michael T. Miller

Elegguas: New Poetry Book by Kamau Brathwaite

This autumn offers readers a cornucopia of poetry, variegated in style and quality. Among the best books is Kamau Brathwaite’s Elegguas (Wesleyan University Press; 128 pages; $22.95). Eleggua, a word for “the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad,” coincidentally resembles “elegy,” a poem for the dead. “Elegguas” weaves epic and elegy, lyric and polemic, to celebrate and mourn the dead of Brathwaite’s extended family, from “Ivie Andersonnng” to Mikey Smith, “stone to death on Stony Hill Kingston Jamaica on Marcus Garvey birthday 17 August 1983″ (“Stone”). Homeric and Joycean allusions harmonize with Caribbean dialect and Brathwaite’s own fine lyric idiolect.

Brathwaite’s form-shifting Sycorax fonts, named after the African witch who bore Caliban (in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”), can be both fun and distracting; besides, his wordplay expresses the topsy-turvy nature of modern language without excessive visual aids. Read/hear the invocation: “my Mother the Noun” and “alphabets stuff upside-down/in my mouth.” He guides us “… from moscow over the alphs …// the grey tundril steppes of mangolia …” and “thru/to the thick slugging streams/ of Kurtz horrow.” “Elegguas” sings with anger and righteousness, but the balm of tender creation emanates from its overtones.

Deeply felt requiems from an internationally celebrated poet

Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Elegguas—a play on “elegy” and “Eleggua,” the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad—is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful “Poem for Walter Rodney.”

Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds “nation-language,” that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings (“calibanisms”) and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Endorsements:

“For nearly half a century, Kamau Brathwaite has been doing nothing short of rewriting the relationship between Africa and the aging ‘new world’—one exquisite and haunting syllable at a time. Elegguas, his newest book, is a tidalectic wave of remembrance and remonstrance. It is, as well, one of Brathwaite’s most compassionate songs.”—Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain Elementary

“Kamau Brathwaite is the major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the great poets of the second part of the 20C anywhere. While framed by elegiac writings of a personal nature, this volume remains profoundly political through a range of elegies for departed public & political figures, and includes what I consider one of the greatest and most poignant political poems of the era, namely Brathwaite’s ‘Poem for Walter Rodney.’ The greatness of the work lies in the fact that the poet never falls into political rhetoric, but that his language, breathtakingly innovative & inventive at the formal level, always carries a lyrical and poetic charge of unequalled intensity.”—Pierre Joris, author of Poasis and A Nomad Poetics

To place a book order go to http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6943-7.html

Popular Knowledge Can Transform People's Worlds
By Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 12, 2010 (IPS) - Valuing and sharing common people's knowledge and experience, awakening critical consciousness and finding paths for effective social participation are the processes used by more than 1,000 people in Cuba working in Popular Education, a liberating approach to education developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in the 1960s.

"The deepest form of participation is when people come together, sharing their own thoughts and feelings, with a strong sense of commitment and full awareness of what they are doing," José Ramón Vidal, head of the Popular Communication Programme at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Centre (CMMLK), told IPS. Combining true dedication and horizontal ways of organising to ensure everyone's opinion was included, the Fourth National Popular Education Encounter was held Nov. 9-12 in the Cuban capital. Cuba has appropriated this educational approach since 1995, when the first workshop was organised.

This philosophy of critical awareness began to find followers in Cuba during the severe economic crisis suffered by the Cuban population in the 1990s. "The hardship we have endured for so many years creates despair and disillusion," said Vidal, a psychologist.

In Vidal's view, people who train in the methodology of popular education experience "re-enchantment" with values and emotions that are denied by the competitive and individualistic culture of free market societies. "They fall in love again with a social project, with what they do, with service, solidarity and sharing," he said.

In the 15 years since the movement arrived in Cuba and the birth of the National Network of Popular Educators, which has about 1,500 members, Freire's precepts have reached community groups and institutions around the country.

In Granma province in southeastern Cuba, "local bodies like the People's Councils are adopting, timidly as yet, this way of doing, learning and organising," Yordenis Monge, coordinator of the Food Sovereignty and Local Development Project in the eastern city of Bayamo, told IPS.

Promoted by Cuban and Spanish non-governmental organisations in three provinces on the island, the outreach initiative involves, directly or indirectly, more than 60 institutions. "Leaders and their community work groups are now going through a Popular Education learning process," Monge said.

Some authorities have recognised the benefits of this way of doing things. According to Mario Cruz Díaz, a member of the local legislature in the province of Holguín, which borders Granma, the method "is a great help in the work of directing, planning, forecasting and coordinating."

In his province, which has a population of more than 300,000, distribution of the few resources available is difficult, and they must be used to the best effect. "When a person receives aid as welfare, without consciously participating, he or she is incapable of really valuing the cost of what they are given," Cruz said.

Freire's educational goal was to encourage people to become critical subjects who were capable of collectively solving their problems, managing their lives and transforming their surroundings. Community and environmental groups and neighbourhoods facing difficulties like poverty and high levels of violence are taking up Popular Education.

Neighbourhood Transformation Workshops in the Cuban capital, the Promotion and Education Centre for Sustainable Development (CEPRODESO) in the western province of Pinar del Río, the La Marina social and cultural project in Matanzas province, and some small farmers' cooperatives are adopting the methodology.

At present, CMMLK is participating in the work of the National Network of Popular Educators in 17 Cuban provinces and municipalities. Most of the network's members are women, according to María Isabel Romero, the coordinator of CMMLK's Popular Education and Participating in Local Experiences Programme. CMMLK also has connections with similar partners abroad, mainly in Latin America, and with social movements. The Cuban centre offers training and promotes Freire's approach for the work of civil society groups in Latin America, Vidal said.

Brazilian theologian Frei Betto contributed to introducing this educational perspective in Cuba, and has closely followed its development. At the meeting, Betto said he brought "this contribution to the (Cuban) Revolution, out of conviction of the political importance of Popular Education methodology."

Latin American activists like Messilene Gorete, of Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST), Honduran activist Salvador Zúñiga of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisation (COPINH), a member of the coalition of groups opposed to the June 2009 coup d'etat, and Dolores Iveth Velasco of Equipo Maíz, a Salvadoran political education group, also attended the meeting.

Velasco is part of an education project working with a wide range of groups in El Salvador. In her view, "Popular Education is that knowledge that we have and build on, but when we organise it, it frees us from the bonds created by the consumer society."

As a result of this liberating methodology, "a person takes up the reins of their own life," she said. According to her social work experience, it is vital to bring women to this kind of learning, so that they "take power over their own bodies and do not allow others to make decisions for them." (END)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Savior Self

The music video for the song 'Savior Self' by Cree Summer. Directed by Mikki Willis for the Elevate Films Fest

Deadbeat Dads

Guidelines

Award Deadline:

 

The PSA will only accept submissions postmarked between October 1 –December 22, 2010.

What can I submit:

 

• You can submit to all contests.
• You can only submit one entry per contest.
• However, you can't submit the same poem to more than one contest:

THE EXCEPTION: Individual poems submitted as part of a group to either the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award or Robert H. Winner Award may be submitted to another PSA contest.

• No previously published work can be submitted:

THE EXCEPTION: The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and the Robert Winner Award. Please include a separate cover-sheet for publication acknowledgments.

 

How to Submit:

• Submissions must be sent in duplicate.
• For each individual contest the entry must include two copies of your submission.
• Each entry must have a separate cover page or your submission will be disqualified.

 

The cover page must include:

 

 

Name
Address
Email (if available)
Phone
Name of the Award
Title and First Line of first (or only) poem in submission

If you are PSA Member, you must note this on your cover sheet to ensure your contest fee is waived.

Your name should not appear anywhere else besides this cover sheet.

The name of the Award must appear on the right hand corner of each page of your submission.

If you are sending poems to more than one contest, please use the same envelope.

 

 

 

 

What is ineligible:

 

• Translations are ineligible.
• Collaborative work is ineligible.
• A poem that has previously won a PSA Award cannot be re-submitted.
• Submissions from PSA employees or officers are ineligible.

Entry Fees:

All contests are free to PSA Members, with the exception of the Norma Farber First Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award, which must be entered and paid for by the publisher.

The entry fee for Non-Members is $15, which entitles the Non-Member to enter any or all of contests 6 through 9.

High school students may send single entries to the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award for the fee of $5.

High school teachers or administrators may submit an unlimited number of their students' poems (one submission per student) for a $20 entry fee.

 

Checks should be made payable to the Poetry Society of America. Please do not send cash.

 

 

Notification:

For an acknowledgment of receipt of submissions, please include a self-addressed, stamped postcard (SASP).

If you would like to receive a print announcement of the awards winners, please enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE); the winners will also be announced on our website.

No entries will be returned; do not enclose a SASE for that purpose.

Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we cannot inform entrants of incorrectly submitted or disqualified material, nor can we accept any corrections or revisions to submissions.

 

 

 

 

Where to send:

 

The PSA will only accept submissions postmarked between October 1st and December 22nd of 2010.

Express Mail and FedEx packages are acceptable but must also be postmarked on or before December 22nd.
Please mail your submission to:

 

Poetry Society of America
Annual Award Submission
15 Gramercy Park
New York, N.Y. 10003

 

Application Checklist:

A completed submission includes:

• TWO copies of each submission, with a cover sheet attached to one of the copies.
• A SASP if you would like acknowledgment of receipt of submission.
• A SASE if you would like to be notified of the winners 
• A check for $15 from Non-Members.
• Membership status clearly marked on cover sheet of each entry.

2011 AWARDS:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

 

Starting September 1, PEN will be accepting submissions for the following awards:

PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers ($35,000)
To a fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.

PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career ($10,000)
To a an author who has published at least 3 works of literary fiction.

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000)
To a distinguished biography published in the United States.

Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama ($7,500)
Honors a Grand Master of American Theater as well as an outstanding new voice.

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000)
To a nonfiction book about sports.

PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry ($5,000)
To a new and emerging American poet of any age showing promise of further literary achievement.

PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship ($5,000)
To a writer of children or young-adult fiction in financial need, who has published at least two books.

PEN/Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000)
To a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective.

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000)
To a current, non-academic book that contributes to the public’s understanding of science and changes how science is approached.

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($5,000)
To a book of essays that best exemplifies the dignity and esteem of the essay form.

PEN/Nora Magid Award ($5,000)
For a magazine editor whose high literary standards and taste have contributed significantly to the excellence of the publication he or she edits.

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)
For book-length translations of poetry into English.

PEN Translation Prize ($3,000)
For book-length translations from any language into English.

Translation Fund Grants ($2,000–$3,000)
To support the translation of book-length works that have not previously appeared in English.

Open Book Awards ($1,000)
Honors books by writers of color published in the U.S.

Announcing the Winners of Meridian’s 2010 Editors’ Prize Contest

 

POETRY
WINNER: Josephine Yu, “Why the Lepidopterist Lives Alone”

 

FICTION
WINNER: Allis Hammond, “The Faces”

Both winners will receive a $1,000 prize, and their pieces will be published in our May 2010 issue.

Thank you to everyone who entered the contest. It was a strong year for poetry and fiction. We hope you’ll submit again in the fall.

 

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Editors’ Prize Contest

The deadline for our 2011 Editors’ Prize is December 17, 2010, midnight EST.

For a $16 entry fee, you receive a chance at a $1,000 prize. The fee will also cover a one-year subscription to Meridian (entries from outside the U.S. will receive only the prize issue due to additional mailing costs.)

We expect to announce winners in March 2011.

All submissions will be considered for publication in Meridian.

Fiction writers may submit one story of 10,000 words or fewer. Poets may submit up to 4 poems.

You may enter more than one time; however, in the past, entering multiple times has not significantly increased a contestant’s odds.

Submit your work through ManuscriptHub.com. Make sure that your account includes a working e-mail (one valid through March of the contest year). It’s the only way for us to contact you.

Best of luck!

Contest Eligibility Rules:

• UVA alumni who graduated after June 2007 are NOT eligible.
• UVA MFA graduates/alumni are NOT eligible.
• Current UVA students, staff, and faculty are NOT eligible.
• Former Meridian staff are not eligible. (If you’ve been on our masthead, don’t enter.)
• Friends, relatives, and former teachers and students of current Meridian staff or its advisor are not eligible.
• Current subscribers may enter the Editors’ Prize Contest for the same $16 fee. Your subscription will be extended by one year (and you will remain, as always, one of our favorite people in the world, even if you get treated like everyone else for the purposes of the contest).

Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film
Click to order via Amazon

by Mia Mask

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: University of Illinois Press;
1st Edition edition (July 2, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0252034228
ISBN-13: 978-0252034220
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches

Book Review by Kam Williams

“By examining the persona of five African-American women celebrities, Divas [on Screen] seeks to push the discussion of African-American celebrity beyond the ‘good, politically progressive role model’ versus ‘bad, regressive black stereotype,’ binary that stifles dialogue and divides scholars. Instead, the ensuing chapters address how African-American celebrity functions as a social phenomenon. This is not to minimize the prevalence of racial stereotypes in the 21st Century…

But the focus of Divas is slightly different. It asks: what can we learn from the complex and contradictory careers of successful black women? Where do we find African-Americans in the performative, ‘other-directed,’ narcissistic culture? What does African-American stardom as a social phenomenon reveal about the aspirations of black folks in the 21st Century? How have African-Americans—in their struggle for inclusion in commercial entertainment—complied with dominant culture?”
— Excerpted from the Introduction (pg. 4)

Vassar Professor Mia Mask has both a bigger vocabulary and a higher IQ than I do, judging by how often she had me reaching for the dictionary and by the many, marvelous insights about cinema she makes that had never occurred to this film critic before. So consider this a fair warning: this sage sister’s book, “Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film” is not light reading but an academic enterprise of considerable substance. That being said, those willing to make the intellectual effort are likely to find themselves richly rewarded by the author’s fresh perspective, priceless pearls of wisdom and impressive background in terms of the cultural, biographical and historical contexts.

The title might strike you as a bit of a misnomer, for it suggests more expansive coverage of African-American actresses than the five icons focused on here, namely, Dorothy Dandridge, Whoopi Goldberg, Pam Grier, Halle Berry and Oprah. Yet, Professor Mask’s unorthodox approach to the subject still feels comprehensive for, along the way, she manages to incorporate bon mots about many of their accomplished contemporaries.

As for that primary quintet, each enjoys her own chapter. Blaxploitation era idol Pam Grier is given her props for playing macho roles which placed an “emphasis on her body in such a way as to create an image of phallic femininity.” At the other extreme, early pioneer Dorothy Dandridge is credited with cultivating “a public persona of respectable, black bourgeois womanhood, feminine beauty, and domesticity.”

Dr. Mask describes Whoopi as an actress excluded from typical romantic screen liaisons whose repertoire instead reflects an inclination to disrupt “the dominant social order” which explains why she has so frequently defied conventional notions about race, gender and sexuality. Of course, Halle and Oprah’s careers are deconstructed, too, and in a thought-provoking fashion that will prevent you from thinking of them in the same way ever again.

A fascinating, feminist examination of a struggle for self-definition in the face of a dominant culture and an entertainment industry perfectly comfortable with serving up stereotypical images of black women designed for mass consumption.