My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 199

Contributors
Jules Allen, a respected, award-winning photographer
lives and works in New York. He is currently on the
faculty of the City University of New York where he is
a professor with the Department of Art and Design at
Queensborough College. Allen’s photographs are
reality-based images as well as metaphorical documents
of which the primary resources are grounded in behavior,
enlightenment and irony.
Allen’s work expresses the essential truth, that a culture’s
power is clearest when presented on its own terms.
He shares the belief of photographer Diane Arbus, who
states; “the more specific a thing is, the more general.”
The artist, Danny Dawson, says wryly that Mr. Allen has
a “keen eye for the obvious.” His lifelong work is evocative
of the contemporary black experience. The images place
subjects, drawn from the richness of black life, within
universal paradigms. His aesthetic vision is rooted in
music, gesture and ritual which renders American
culture both locally and abroad. His photographs are in
museum collections worldwide, including the Museum
of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian,
the National Gallery. His extensive commercial and
corporate work has been seen on the covers of numerous
periodicals, magazines, journals albums and compact
discs. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants.
Carol Diehl is an artist, critic (Contributing Editor,
Art in America), and former performance poet (Nuyorican
Poets Cafe) based in New York. Her article in this issue
of Black Renaissance Noire originally appeared on her
blog, Art Vent.
Aracelis Girmay is the author/illustrator of the
collage-based children’s book changing, changing (2005),
and the two poetry collections Teeth (2007) and Kingdom
Animalia (2011). Her new projects include a short film
collaboration with the Critical Projections collective as
well as a new poetry collection slated for publication
by BOA Editions in spring 2016. She is on the faculty of
Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts.
Paul Carter Harrison is an award-winning playwright/
director/theatre theorist whose work has been produced
and published in both the United States and Europe.
A native New Yorker, he has had a long artistic association,
as writer/director, with the Negro Ensemble Company
that had produced his earlier plays, Tophat, Abe rcrombie
Apocalypse, and the celebrated Great MacDaddy for
which he was recipient of an Obie Award. Harrison is
the author of The Drama of Nomo (1973) a seminal work
on African Diasporic expression. He is also co-editor of
Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora.
(2002) Currently Visiting Artist/Scholar at Emory
University, he served as co-director of the NEH sponsored
institute at Emory University titled “Black Aesthetics
and African Centered Cultural Expressions: Sacred
Systems in the Nexus Between Cultural Studies Religion
and Philosophy.”

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Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University
of Hawaii, Manoa, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s books
include The Year of the Rat (1996), Dog Road Woman
(1997), Off-Season City Pipe (2005), Blood Run (2007) and
Burn (2014). Her new book of poems, Streaming, will
be published in December 2014 by Coffee House Press.
In addition to poetry, Ms. Hedge Coke has published a
memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer (2004) as well. She is
also the editor of several anthologies, including: Sing:
Poetry of the Indigenous Americas (2011) Effigies (2009)
and Effigies II (2014). Hedge Coke came of age working
fields, factories, and waters and is at work on a film,
Red Dust: resiliency in the dirty thirties and a new CD
with Kelvyn Bell & Laura Ortman as Rd KlÄ.

Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, leadbelly (2005), was a
winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. A Cave Canem
Alumni, he received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from
the National Endowment for the Arts, was a 2004-2005
Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center,
and won a 2006 Whiting Award. He exhibited his poetry
at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Wave Press will
publish his next book, Olio, in 2016. He is Associate
Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Dennis Kardon (born 1950) is an American painter based
in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times’ Ken Johnson
has described Dennis Kardon’s paintings as “generously
painterly, voluptuously creepy narrative pictures of
familial conflict, sexual angst and infantile yearning.”
Kardon’s work has been exhibited widely in the United
States and abroad.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Taboo,
(2006) Dien Cai Dau, (1988) Neon Vernacular, (2003)
for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Warhorses,(2009)
The Chameleon Couch, (2010) and most recently
Testimony (2013). His plays, performance art and libretti
have been performed internationally and include
Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh. He teaches at
New York University.
Colleen j. McElroy lives in Seattle, Washington where she
is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington.
Editor-in-chief of The Seattle Review from 1995-2006,
McElroy has published nine collections of poems, most
recently, Sleeping with the Moon (2007), for which she
received a 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award,
and Here I Throw Down My Heart, (University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2012), was a finalist for the Binghampton University
Milt Kessler Book Award, the Walt Whitman Award,
the Phyllis Wheatley Award, and the Washington State
Governor’s Book Award. Winner of the 1985 Before
Columbus American Book Award in poetry for Queen
of the Ebony Isles, she has also received two Fulbright
Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships, a Jesse Ball DuPont
Distinguished Black Scholar Fellowship, and a Rockefeller
Foundation Fellowship. Recently, her work has been
featured in The Oxford Anthology of African American
Poetry, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of
Contemporary African American Poetry, Best American
Poetry, Black Renaissance Noire, The Best American Poetry
2001, and online at torch and poetryfoundation.org.
Many of her poems have been translated into Russian,
Italian, Arabic, Greek, French, German, Malay, and
Serbo-Croatian.
Nina Angela Mercer’s plays include Gutta Beautiful;
Racing My Girl, Sally; Itagua Meji: A Road & A Prayer; &
Gypsy & The Bully Door. Her plays have been produced
as staged readings and productions in Washington, D.C.
at The Warehouse Theatre and The Woolly Mammoth
Theatre Company for DC’s Fringe Festival; in New Jersey
at Rutgers University; and in NYC at Wings Theatre,
Brecht Forum, Brooklyn Public Library, The Classical
Theatre of Harlem, Dumbo Sky for The American
Theatre of Harlem, and Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street
Settlement for Woodie King Jr’s New Federal Theatre
Company. In Trinidad, Nina’s work has been staged at The
Little Carib Theatre. In March 2015, Gypsy & The Bully Door
will have its World Premiere with The African Continuum
Theatre Company at The Atlas Performing Arts Center
in Washington, D.C. She is a co-founder and executive
director of Ocean Ana Rising (OAR), an arts education
non-profit organization dedicated to the holistic
liberation of women and girls through artistic expression.
Currently, Nina serves as a faculty member at Medgar
Evers College (CUNY) in Brooklyn, New York. Nina is also
the mother of two daughters, Aya Imani and Raisa Selam.

E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is
the board chair of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and
the director of the African American Resource Center at
Howard University. His last published book was The 5th
Inning (2009), a second memoir. Mr. Miller is often heard
on National Public Radio (NPR).
Kofi Natambu is the author of a biography entitled
Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books, 2002) and
two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents
Press, 1991) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press, 1983).
He was the founding editor of and contributing writer
to a national quarterly literary magazine of the arts,
culture and politics called Solid Ground: A New World
Journal, which he published from 1980 – 1990. He was
also editor of a literary anthology entitled Nostalgia For
The Present (Post Aesthetic Press, 1985). Natambu has
taught literature, history, literary theory and criticism,
film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy,
critical theory, African American studies, and music
history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at
the University of Cali fornia, Irvine, San Francisco State
University, California Institute of the Arts, Detroit
Institute of Arts Museum, Wayne State University, Long
Island University (NY), St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and in
the New York public school system in Harlem and the
South Bronx. He was also a curator in the Education
Department of the Museum of African American History
in Detroit. Since March 2008 he has been the editor of and
a contributing writer to The Panopticon Review, an online
magazine of politics and culture. Natambu currently
lives and works in Berkeley, California with his wife
Chuleenan, a writer, visual artist, and magazine editor.
C. Michael Norton was born in North Dakota and raised
between North Dakota and California. After receiving his
MFA in Sculpture in 1981 from San Jose State University,
he received a grant in 1984 from the French Ministry of
Culture to live and exhibit in Paris, Grenoble and Nice,
where he began painting. His works are informed by the
Figuration Libre painters in France, the Neo-Figuration
painters of Germany, and his experiences with artists in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Of his paintings, Norton says,
“I ‘build’ a painting using mud-knives instead of paint
brushes, constructing organic volumes and architectonic
planes, generating vibrant skins, which stretch across
the canvas to embrace a complex web of ideas, emotions
and textures. He lives in New York City with his wife, the
painter and sculptor, Ruth Hardinger.
Cynthia Dewi Oka is a poet and author of Nomad of Salt
and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012). Recently, her poems
have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Terrain.org, Kweli
Journal, Apogee, Kalyani Magazine, JMWW, Briarpatch
Magazine, Boxcar Poetry Review, Dismantle: An Anthology
of Writing from the VONA Writers’ Workshop (Thread
Makes Blanket, 2014) and other publications. She is a
2014 recipient of an artist grant from the Vermont
Studio Center and is currently serving as Poetry Editor of
Generations Literary Journal. Originally born and raised
in Bali, Indonesia, she now lives in New Jersey.
Brenda Marie Osbey is an author of poetry and of prose
nonfiction in English and French. Her volumes include
All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997)
and History and Other Poems (Time Being Books, 2013).
A native of New Orleans, Osbey was appointed the first
peer-selected poet laureate of Louisiana in 2005.
Hermine Pinson has published three poetry collections
and two CD’s, Changing the Changes in Poetry & Song
(2006), in special collaboration with Estella Majozo
and Pulitzer-prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa
and Deliver Yourself (2012) with the Harris Simon Trio. Her
most recent short fiction appears in Richmond Noir and
ragazine.cc. She teaches creative writing and African
American literature at the College of William and Mary.