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Baring My Soul
By Stacey Tolbert
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Stacey Tolbert The
Brown Suga Poet
deliberately serenades suppressed emotions inside
the soul while sensually feeding audiences with raw, mentally
evoking lyrical sugar cane. Each unique "suga' packet" inside the
mini=sized chapbook will whisper gently in your artistic ear and
leave readers mesmerized in a moment of stanzaic thunderstorm as
hot and cold . . . present and past . . . joy and pain collide. The "sweet" 122-page alphabetic
explosion is something you don't want to miss. Take cover.
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Anastacia Tolbert is
a writer of poetry, prose, plays, and journalism. She is
a graduate of the Cave Canem program for African
American poets and holds an undergraduate degree in
English and Creative Writing from the University of
Missouri at Kansas City. She is currently Resident
Writer at the Seattle Girls School.
She received a 2004 San Diego
Journalism Press Club Award for her article “War Torn.”
In 2007, she wrote, co-produced and co-directed
GOTBREAST?, a documentary about women and body
image. She has taught writing, poetry and performance
workshops to students of all ages at schools, literary
centers, battered women’s shelters, youth camps, and
libraries.
Anastacia’s poetry and prose
have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Essence and San
Diego City Beat, as well as in the anthologies Cave
Canem XI, Alehouse
Journal, The Drunken Boat, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology
of Female Poets & Emcees (which
was nominated for the 2007 NAACP Award), and I
Woke Up and Put My Crown On: 76 Voices of African
American Women. She has performed her poetry in more
than fifty venues, including colleges, writers’
conferences, and art museums, and as a featured artist
on six radio stations.
Anastacia says of
her work:
When I was growing
up in the Midwest in the late 70s and 80s, women writers
were typically stereotyped as "gifted" but poor, wishful
bohemians -- people proud to be labeled writers while
suffering from acute cases of “starving artist
syndrome.” I distinctly remember a journalism professor
telling me in front of an ambitious class of fifty that
I would never be able to do anything with my creative
writing skills, except maybe copy editing . . . if I was
lucky, and that I should immediately come to the
realization that I would never generate income doing
creative writing...and no one outside of my family would
ever read my work. Fortunately, I don't believe in luck
and I was an active participant in watching my writing
goals manifest.
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She is the Author of
Baring My Soul, Playwright of the drama A Quarter Past The Blues,
freelance writer of various print and online magazines spoken
wordist, motivational speaker and Workshop facilitator of
Healertainment, C.P.A.M. and Sistainment-GirlsGroup workshops.
My poetic form uses white
space as narrator and seeks to be a drum for feminism,
race, sexuality, trauma and grief. My poems often
reflect on a succinct moment, using voice or character
development
Anastacia Tolbert is a multifarious mix of grit,
sunshine, alphabet juice & butterflies. She is a writer,
performance artist, documentarian, teacher and workshop
facilitator.
Anastacia Tolbert
Table
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
1 January 2012
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