Afro-amer/eng 672 Fall 2011

exceptional anthology of jazz stories & poems

The appearance in 1926 of Langston Hughes's first volume of poems, The Weary Blues, announced the arrival on the American literary scene not only of a new voice and tone, but also of a new sort of voice. Close to the rhythms of Negro speech and song, these apparently artless verses -- which, of course, in reality proclaim a poet of sophistication and keen sensibility -- brought to many readers throughout the English-speaking world a new enjoyment of the multifarious voices of Harlem and the other places where Negroes live in large numbers. Since The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes -- to mention only his verse -- has published Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), The Dream Keeper (1932), Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Fields of Wonder (1947), One Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Ask Your Mama (1961), and The Panther and the Lash (1967).

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes represents Langston Hughes's own decisions as to which of his poems he most wanted to preserve and reprint. It contains not only selections from his published books (including private publication), but also poems that either had never been published before or had appeared only in periodicals.

Here are reflected the rhythms of jazz, the blues, and spirituals. Arna Bontemps has called Langston Hughes the "original jazz poet," and it is worth noting that Hughes in his last years often read his poetry to jazz accompaniment. But there is more in these poems than jazz, its rhythms and its significance. Here, too, are the travail, the joys and accomplishments, the wide-eyed wonder and bitter realizations of a transplanted race. Here, most important of all, are the affirmations and speech of a true poet. Primarily a lyricist, Langston Hughes learned how to speak with intensity of the things that mattered to him, the human factors that he understood and appreciated, whether in praise, in condemnation, or in sheer song.

Set in Claybourne, a small town somewhere in the South, THE SALT EATERS is the story of a community of black faith healers who, searching for the healing properties of salt, witness an event that will change their lives forever.

Ask Me Now explores the relationship between the language of music and the music of language with 20 conversations on jazz and literature. Writer, editor, and saxophonist Sascha Feinstein gathers a variety of artists, poets, musicians, fiction writers, essayists, playwrights, and record producers for discussions on the elusive but engaging relationships between jazz and literature.

Featured artists include central figures of the Black Arts Movement such as Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez as well as distinguished music critics Gary Giddins, Dan Morgenstern, and Eugene B. Redmond. Winners of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry Yusef Komunyakaa and Philip Levine, outstanding jazz musicians Bill Crow and Fred Hersch, and several writers who cross literary genres: Hayden Carruth, Cornelius Eady, David Jauss, William Matthews, Lee Meitzen Grue, John Sinclair, and Al Young all contribute their thoughts to the book.

Adrienne Rich chose Cathy Park Hong's "audacious" (Los Angeles Times) second book as the winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize.

Named one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Science Fiction Books in 2007, Dance Dance Revolution is a genre-bending tour de force told from the perspective of the Guide, a former dissident and tour guide of an imagined desert city.

exceptional anthology of jazz stories & poems

This moving collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway presents a complex view of a gifted artist through imagined conversations and interviews that convey the voices, surroundings, and clashing dimensions of Hathaway's life.

Among mainstream audiences Hathaway is perhaps best known either as the syrupy voice singing with Roberta Flack in "Where Is the Love" or for his shocking death--he was found dead beneath the open thirteenth-story window of his New York hotel room in 1979 at the age of thirty-three. Less well known are the depth of his classical and gospel training, his wide-ranging intellectual interests, and the respect his musical knowledge, talent, and versatility commanded from collaborators like Curtis Mayfield and Aretha Franklin. Meanwhile, among listeners with special affinity for soul music of the 1970s, even almost thirty years after his death, no voice burns with the intensity of Hathaway's own in the great solo ballads and freedom songs such as "A Song for You," "Giving Up," "Someday We'll All Be Free," and "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black."

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced pushes poetry toward the rich characterization and depth of a novel. Yet it is the capacity of poetic language that allows the book to examine Donny Hathaway's vivid and remarkable life without attempting to resolve the mysteries within which he lived and created and sang.

Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times and Winner of the 1999 Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award for Fiction

For Vietnam veteran Jesse Pasadoble, now a defense attorney living in San Francisco, the battle still rages: in his memories; in the gang wars erupting on Potrero Hill; and in the recent slaying of two women-one black, one Vietnamese. In seeking justice for the young man accused of the brutal double murder, Jesse must walk with the men who died on another hill . . . men who were his comrades and friends in a war that crossed racial divides. Finding the truth means confronting the ghosts of Vietnam-and the possibility of his own redemption.

A novel that makes mesmerizing leaps of imagination as it moves seamlessly between past and present, Gods Go Begging tells an unforgettable story of war and peace, guilt and innocence, suffering and love.

"Va is a true artist . . . his rendering of the Vietnam War is thoroughly original."--Los Angeles Times