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Brooklyn Moon -For One Night Only

Brooklyn Moon -For One Night Only
by Ron Kavanaugh

Thursday, March 8, 2012 – There’s no going back. The 90s poetry scene, laden with promise, talent, and camaraderie has been displaced by motherhood, mortgages, and tenure. But for a moment, the scene, which was originally centered at Brooklyn Moon Cafe, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and numerous other closet-sized spots with three tables and six chairs, was revisited in the 400-seat Cantor Auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum. As poet Jasiri observed, “I’m feeling straight up George & Weezy in here.” Read more

Down These Mean Streets: A Piri Thomas Celebration

What does it mean to be Black, Puerto Rican, and marginalized, all within your small neighborhood, within your family? In 1967, Piri Thomas’s seminal memoir “Down These Mean Streets” chronicled his life –a young man living a hard life in the streets of El Barrio, Spanish Harlem. The book would go on to become required reading for anyone trying to find a way out, or a way in. Read more

Rebecca Walker and Michaela angela Davis

February 14, 2012 – Rebecca Walker and Image Activist Michaela angela Davis conducted a conversation about Walker’s new anthology Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness. The collection—with essays written by prominent voices and figures such as bell Hooks, Henry Louis Gates, dream Hampton, Staceyann Chin as well as Michaela—explores the origins, aesthetics as well as personal definitions of “black cool.” Read more

Camille T. Dungy

Camille T. Dungy is the author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison; Suck on the Marrow, for which she received a 2011 American Book Award; and Smith Blue. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award. Always a fan of her poetry, when Mosaic gave me the opportunity to ask Camille a few questions I moved fast. Read more

Best Books of 2011

NONFICTION

Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11
By Caryl Phillips

The New Press
In this book of personal and critical essays, Caryl Phillips explores themes of cultural awareness and racial identity that are often at the center of his engaging fiction. Color Me English is a profound collection of previously written, Read more