Last year and much of this year I did very little posting on my website. But I read voraciously. I found myself not just reading newer releases but also books that had been out for decades that I had somehow missed. I tend to read a few books at once, […]
On June 4th I made a speech for the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Circle’s 95th Poets Dinner and Award Ceremony that was held in Benicia City Park. Several people asked if they could read the speech so I offer it below. When given the theme of discovery I used my typical […]
In 1968 Black Fire literary anthology edited by Imari Baraka and Larry Neal was released creating a clarion call for the Black Arts Movement. Essays and poetry from a range of authors including Nathan Hare, Calvin C. Hernton, Sun-Ra, Henry Dumas, A.B. Spellman, Sonia Sanchez and many others. Fifty-four years […]
I have a fairly limited experience with opera. My growing years were mostly jazz with a few helpings of blues, a handful of Broadway musicals, and of course full servings of R&B and Soul as my teens beckoned. But there were also recordings of Handel’s “Messiah,” “Amahl and the Night […]
A poet, for whom I have much respect as poet and person, on reading a recently finished manuscript counseled me to reconsider my use of “I” in the poems. No specific poems were pointed to simply the observation that I could create stronger poems in that way. The poet noted that […]
I always have problems answering the question of what poet or poets most influence me. In what way? In what period of my life? Living or ancestor? Yet when one of them passes I am deeply aware of how profound their influence was and is. Mari Evans is one such […]
We have long talked about the USA being at the doorway of fascism, of totalitarianism. Now we joke bitterly that in the face of Trump, Bush doesn’t seem so bad. And now, sadly, finally we have arrived and are stepping over the threshold to the end of this nation as […]
On Wednesday January 18, 2017 in a windy, cold pouring rain storm San Francisco’s Main Library’s Koret Auditorium under the auspicious of the SFPL and LItquake filled with people listening to writers responding to the looming reality of a Trump presidency. It was an honor for me to be […]
A friend e-mailed me recently asking if I she could use a poem I sent to her a while ago. I read the poem and for just over a day could not remember whose dead I spoke of. The names gave clues, Syria was freshest, but then it could have […]
giovanni singleton is a writer who is always seeking to find new lands where her ideas can root and new seas where they can sail. Award winning Poet and editor, , visual poet, and prose writer, giovanni singleton is a writer who dares to be herself. e.e. cummings once wrote […]
