We Are All the Black Boy [Paperback]

Michael Warr (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 56 pages
• Publisher: Tia Chucha; 1 edition (January 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 096242871X
• ISBN-13: 978-0962428715
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,390,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Warr was born in Baton Rouge, LA and grew up in San Francisco, CA. His literary honors include the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Ragdale Foundation US - Africa Fellowship, and others. His most recent book is The Armageddon of Funk (Tia Chucha Press). We Are All The Black Boy, his first book of poems was honored by the Illinois Library Association. He is also a co-editor of Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex. A frequent collaborator with musicians, visual and performing artists, his poems have been dramatized for theater, depicted on canvas, and set to original musical composition. An award-winning arts educator, he combines poetry, performance, and storytelling with digital images, text, and music in interactive writing and mentoring workshops.

A few convoluted influences: family conversion from southern Baptists to Jehovah's Witnesses; Black Panthers agitating outside my high school; stealing "3000 Years of Black Poetry" as a teenager and discovering Anonymous, Claude McKay, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and poets I would meet after moving from San Francisco to Chicago, namely Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Don Lee (later Haki Madhubuti), and Victor Hernandez Cruz; works of The Last Poets, Shelley, Adrienne Rich, Hirschman, Troupe, David Hernandez, Angela Jackson, Reginald Gibbons; learning of Neruda at a kitchen table in the Hollywood Hills; the Chicago performance poetry community; Timbuktu; room-mating with Luis Rodriguez; five years in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where I exhausted the American Embassy Library, dined with guerillas, harbored revolutionaries, wrote everyday, and was interrogated in a cell under Haile Selassie's Jubilee Palace; the arts; Serow; Major Girma; DuBois, Fanon, Malcolm, Marx, Peery, Fine, Tesfarmariam, Tuchman, James Brown, Hendrix, Funkadelic, Gould, Wonder, Gaye, Corea, Taylor, Morrison, Laws, Montgomery, Coltrane, Davis, Santana, Sly, Solti, Public Enemy, Blondy and more; Zimbabwean guerillas; a Polisario Front diplomat; southside Chicago; merging poetry with musicians: Mitar Mitch Covic, Nefasha Ayer, Quijerema; finding the Red Poppy Art House; the streets of Paris and Cairo, the hollows of Appalachia, the Kingdom Halls of San Francisco, the warfront in Eritrea; a train in the Ogaden...

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Local boy makes good, June 21, 2000

By 

Erren Geraud Kelly - See all my reviews

This review is from: We Are All the Black Boy (Paperback)

i intially picked up this book when i noticed that he was from my hometown, baton rouge, louisiana...but this little book is an underrated gem. while you have the standard social and political commentaries that most black writers delve into, check out his love poems. i found myself rereading them over and over, taken by their poignancy...