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Books by Latorial Faison
Secrets of My Soul: A Collection of Poetry /
Immaculate Perceptions
28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History I /
28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History
II
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Chaos
By Latorial Faison From
the depths
of a mean spirited world
where love realizes hate
becomes us
and tears away
just eats away at us
human souls rot to the core
and I, with my bible reading self,
stand too confused about what to make of this
the here and now
the afterlife
as I'm faced with fears of immortality
red blood in blue veins
running on time
while life stands still at the creation of war
and the cremation of peace
with books, words, ethics,
money and motions,
potions, philosophies,
solutions and sayings
and the earth spins
minute by minute
into a sordid, confusing ideology
to greet the dutiful chosen
who have challenged life
defining it, maligning it, pretending to give it
then taking it away
those tongues of fire
that preach to us
without leading us souls
along the way
and I stand so . . .
commanded by thoughts
of living --in today's chaos-- without a soul.posted 10 September 2005 |
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Latorial Faison,
a native of Courtland, VA, studied English and Religious
Studies at the University of Virginia and VA TECH. Faison
has been writing poetry since adolescence, but in March 2000
she walked onto the literary scene as the founding editor of
Poetically Speaking, a globally read online poetry
magazine. In 2001 Faison's first book collection of poems,
Secrets of My Soul, was published. This collection
set the stage for what would follow in later publications
such as
Immaculate Perceptions in 2003, and two collections,
28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History I (2006)
and
28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History II (
2008).
Faison has been
published in various literary journals, magazines,
anthologies, and online publications. She has been published
in the US and abroad in the following: Anointed Magazine,
Whispers of Inspiration, The Digital Drum
sponsored by BET, Facets Literary Magazine,
RiverSedge, The Nubian Chronicles, Seeker
Magazine, Timbooktu, The Taj Mahal Review,
Red River Review, and many other venues.
Latorial's story "On
Good Ground" is featured in the 2003 NAACP winner,
Keeping the Faith, a collection of nonfiction essays on
love, courage, healing and hope from Black America edited by
Tavis Smiley. Her work has also received notice on radio
shows like The Tom Joyner Morning Show and PowerTalkFM.com.
She has taught for
various colleges and universities in the U.S. Currently,
Faison is an Online Instructor for DeVry University.
Latorial Faison is currently accepting speaking engagements
as well as opportunities to appear and read poetry. For
information on upcoming events, visit the EVENTS page of
this site. Invite Latorial Faison, Poet & Author, to your
next community, church, school, college, or university
event.
http://latorial.faithweb.com/Biography.html
Visit her online at
http://www.latorialfaison.com/
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. —Jamie Byng, Guardian |
/ Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron
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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—Publishers
Weekly |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. .— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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