GREAT BAY, St. Martin (Feb. 2, 2003) — The American author Amiri Baraka is scheduled to speak in St. Martin on February 11 at the Creative Writing Program (CWP), said Lasana M. Sekou, the CWP coordinator.
Baraka’s address will be “The role of the writer in a developing nation.” A Q&A and discussion will follow between him and the participants of the CWP’s “Creative Writing Process” class.
House of Nehesi Publishers invited Baraka in November 2002, to deliver one key lecture during its first six-month writing course that started in January 2003. Baraka’s lovely wife of 38 years, poet-activist Amina, will accompany him on this their second visit to the Caribbean in just over 30 years.
The author of some 40 books of essays, poems, drama and music history and criticism, is “a revolutionary thinker of the highest order and an indomitable political activist whose activism has taken him from Black Nationalism during the 1960s to Marxism-Leninism—without ever turning his literature into dogma or being an apologist for any movement or ideology,” said Sekou. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and “No American writer has been more committed to social justice than Amiri Baraka,” stated Beatriz Badikian in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (2002). Baraka’s two recent books, Eulogies and Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music were published in 2002.
The native of Newark, New Jersey, is probably best known around the world as the father of the Black Arts Movement, founded in Harlem in the 1960s, and for his signature work on African-American music, Blues People and the play Dutchman (1963), which earned him the prestigious OBIE award. Baraka was recently inducted into The American Academy of Arts & Letters, awarded the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts and last July named Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002-2004).
Baraka, 68, who is also known for headlining news in ways rare to poets and authors, is currently engaged in a battle royal with New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and detractors demanding his resignation as Poet Laureate because of his poem about the 9-11 WTC bombings that has generated tremendous controversy—causing the author’s photo and words to be splashed across the pages of The New York Times and New York’s Amsterdam News and to be featured on CNN—to name a few US city, state, national and international media.