Amiri Baraka Lecture: at the Charles H. Wright Museum (2013)

Amiri Baraka is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism. He is a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded "the cultural corollary to black nationalism" of that revolutionary American milieu.

Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979) to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina. The Essence of Reparations (2003) is Baraka's first published collection of essays in book form, radically exploring the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit - MOCAD 
FATTENING BLOGS FOR SNAKES 2017