AMIRI BARAKA
Provocative, passionate and challenging, Baraka's work continues to stir political and social controversy.
With Michael Bigley
Provocative, passionate and challenging, Baraka's work continues to stir political and social controversy.
With Michael Bigley
"Artists
have a job to do," argues Amiri Baraka "to raise
the consciousness of the community," and in the
service of that mandate he has persistently used
his poetry to make assertions that often challenge
widely shared ideologies, values and politics of
America's mainstream media, national government,
corporate powers and religious organizations.
Despite the unpopularity of some of his stances
(including Anti-Zionism), Baraka's commitment to
the idea of poetry as a place for risks, vigorous
debate and social change makes both his work and
our public and private responses to it feel
vital.
Amiri Baraka is the author of over 40 books of
essays, poems, dramas, music history and criticism.
One of the founders of Harlem's Black Arts Movement
of the 1960s, he has since recieved numerous awards
and honors including an Obie, an American Academy
of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon
Johnson Medal, and grants from the NEA and the
Rockefeller Foundation. A poet and revolutionary
political activist, he has read and lectured
extensively in the USA, the Carribean, Africa and
Europe. He currently lives in Newark with his wife,
author Amina Baraka, where they jointly head up the
word-music ensemble "Blue Ark: the word ship."