poetry
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The Mic Is Open: Poet Dabriel Fulton Is Giving Voice to All
If the mic were open, what would you say? For the many underground poets, singers, rappers and comedians struggling to find spaces to showcase and workshop their talents, poet, performer and community activist Dabriel Fulton has created the Mic Is Open, an inclusive and inspiring forum for those who often go unheard. Says Fulton, via…
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19-Year-Old Harvard Student Becomes America’s 1st Youth Poet Laureate
In April, 19-year-old Amanda Gorman was named America’s first national youth poet laureate. The Los Angeles native is a sophomore at Harvard University studying sociology. According to the New York Times, Gorman’s work is “a cleareyed mix of autobiography, social issues like Islamophobia, and historical motifs picked up from her college’s library.” In addition to…
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The Unsinkable Nikki Giovanni Reflects on a Life of Tears and Laughter in New Collection
You don’t have to wonder where Nikki Giovanni is on a Saturday night. The iconic poet, who just released her latest collection of poems last week, is a devout Saturday Night Live fan and is especially impressed by Alec Baldwin and his Donald Trump impersonations. “He has Trump nailed as the fool that he is,”…
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Canada’s Ex-Poet Laureate Stole From Tupac and Maya Angelou in the Greatest Cultural Appropriation of All Time
Move over, Taylor Swift. Kendall and Kylie, have as many seats as you need. There’s a new front-runner for The Root’s second-annual Wypipo Awards, and even though the nominations have not yet been formally submitted, I have a feeling that Pierre DesRuisseaux might be 2017’s runaway winner. Pierre DesRuisseaux is a prolific poet and writer…
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How 1 Black Woman Goes Inside Fla.’s Toughest Prisons to Help Inmates Get ‘Free on the Inside’
Facing a decade and a half in prison couldn’t stop her. Losing a loved one to suicide didn’t destroy her. Battling loss and pain while raising three children was not enough to make her quit. “Black Girl Magic” is a beautiful phrase. It summons up the image of some supernatural divination that has been arbitrarily…
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On Maya Angelou’s Birthday, Black Girls Breathe Life Into Her Words
“If I had my druthers, I’d rather be born black, American, female and in the 20th century. And I was. What luck I have,” said Maya Angelou in 2010. With these words, Angelou spoke with the White House on the cusp of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor in the United States,…
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Local Non-Profit Helps Los Angeles High School Students ‘Get Lit’
A Los Angeles-based nonprofit is helping local high school students to learn to love and appreciate poetry, and recently turned a group of them into published poets. Get Lit, founded in 2006 by Diane Luby Lane, is an organization that brings poetry into schools and “fuses classic and spoken word poetry to increase teen literacy…
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PJ Visits EmersonWRITES: Who Will Survive In America?
If you’ll remember, a few weeks back Damon and I had went to speak at Harvard. You probably remember because I wrote about it. Well, before that trip happened I happened to mention the possibility of this trip to a really good friend of mine who happens to live in Boston. I’ve known this young…