The title alone, Up South In Akron: Summer 1959, is enough to stoke the flames of curiosity: How can Akron — a modest Ohio metropolis up north known as the “Rubber Capital of the World” — be “Up South ...

FLINT, MI – “This is not a performance group,” said The Last Poets member, Abiodun Oyewole. “We are truthsayers. That’s what we’ve always been.” The intimate crowd of around 30 people listened with ...

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Smoke the Mic is featuring poet and lyricist Umar Bin Hassan this Monday night. As the tale goes, Bin Hassan sold his sister’s record player to buy a bus ...

There is a track that has become an unlikely earworm for me over the past few weeks. It’s called Bird’s Word and it isn’t really what you’d call a song in the traditional sense. It’s more a ...

‘These fellow Black artists who — at that time, it’s all new, it doesn’t exist yet — they said, “Black people don’t like poetry.” So I said, “They’ll like mine.”’ GYLAN KAIN, the Harlem-born founder ...

Gylan Kain, the spoken-word artist known as Kain the Poet, who co-founded the influential New York outfit the Last Poets, died of complications from heart disease on February 7, The New York Times ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. Black-and-white group photograph of ...