Once You Learn How to Read, You Will Be Forever Free!~Frederick Douglass

REVIEW JOHN ABBOTT’s award-winning jazz photography has been featured on over 250 album and magazine covers. He has been the primary cover photographer for JazzTimes magazine since 2002. He is a regular contributor to numerous national and international publications, advertising campaigns, and corporate annual reports. John has been a New York City based photographer for 25 years.
ROBERT BLUMENTHAL, winner of two Grammy awards for Best Album Notes and a Lifetime Achievement award from the Jazz Journalists Association, is a former contributor to The Boston Phoenix and The Boston Globe and the author of Jazz: An Introduction to the History and Legends Behind America’s Music. Click here for more on Sonny Rollins

REVIEW Keith Gilyard, distinguished professor of English at Penn State University, new book, John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism.

In this first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s. Figuring prominently in these pages are the many important African American artists and political figures connected to the author from the 1930s to the 1980s—W. E. B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and Maya Angelou, among others.

Killens’s politically charged novels And Then We Heard the Thunder and The Cotillion or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of which is his novel Youngblood, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher, Killens was the founding chair of the Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement.