Tribute to Jayne Cortez featuring Robin D.G. Kelley, in conversation with Justin Desmangles
Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez is the author of 10 books of poems, and as many recordings. Her voice has been celebrated for its political, surrealistic and dynamic innovations in lyricism and visceral sound. Her poems have been translated into many languages and widely published in anthologies, journals and magazines. She has won the Arts International, International African Festival, Langston Hughes Award, American Book Award, Bellagio Residency Award from the Rockefeller Foundation and Thelma McAndless Distiguished Professorship Award. Her most recent books are On the Imperial Highway, The Beautiful Book and Jazz Fan Looks Back. Her latest CD recordings with the Firespitter Band are As if You Knew, Find Your Own Voice and Taking the Blues Back Home. Cortez was cofounder and president of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa Inc. She was an organizer of international symposiums and director of the films Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition and Creative Progress and Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writer Dissecting Globalization. Cortez can be seen in the films Women In Jazz and Poetry In Motion. Cortez, with her band The Firespitters, last performed in San Francisco, hosted by The Poetry Center, in 2008. She died in December 2012.
Robin D.G. Kelley
Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at University of California, Los Angeles. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; “Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, which Village Voice selected one of the top 10 books of 1998; and Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, written with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn.