A Daughter and Father Address Violence Against Women and the Legacy of Jazz Poetry  on the April 2nd Left of Black

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in studio by AfroLez®femcentric Cultural Worker Aishah Shahidah Simmons and her father, Human Rights Activist Michael Simmons.  The director of the groundbreaking film No! The Rape Documentary, Simmons and her father discuss her coming-out process, the critical importance of fathers in the lives of their daughters and the impact of their shared work addressing Violence Against Women.

Later Neal is joined via Skype© by Meta DuEwa Jones, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of  The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press).   She discusses the influence of Jazz on the poetry of  Langston Hughes and how jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, would later inspire generations of poets.  Lastly, Jones touches on Spoken Word’s relevance to other art forms.

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Left of Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on the Ustream channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/left-of-black. Viewers are invited to participate in a Twitter conversation with Neal and featured guests while the show airs using hash tags #LeftofBlack or #dukelive. 

Left of Black is recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

Follow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackMan

Follow Aishah Shahidah Simmons on Twitter: @AfroLez

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