Left of Black S2:E26 | April 2, 2012

A Daughter and Father Address Violence Against Women and the Legacy of Jazz Poetry

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in studio by AfroLez®femcentric Cultural Worker Aishah Shahidah Simmons and her father, International 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, who discusses her new book The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press).   Jones discusses how Langston Hughes often “queered” gender in his recorded performances, John Coltrane’s role in inspiring generations of poets, and the importance of collectives like the Dark Room Collective and Cave Canem to the emergent Spoken Word Movement.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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