Friday was one of the busiest, most beautiful days I’ve had in a while.

Started off the day at KPFA, 94.1FM, with the amazing, radical Nora Barrows-Friedman working on my new segment “The Art of Resistance” that is gonna be a regular feature on Flashpoints starting this week. (More info on that coming soon!) Then in the early evening I headed over to the Layover bar in downtown Oakland for the release party of 580 Split, where I got a chance to read my pieces from the journal (at 250 pages, that ain’t no journal…that’s a real-ass book) alongside Chinaka Hodge, Aimee Suzarra, Raphael Cohen, and a whole bunch of other writers who do NOT play! You can watch clips from the reading here.

And THEN…to top it all off, I drove up to UC-Davis for quite simply one of the best shows I’ve gotten to rock at in a long time. It was an all-star lineup: Do DAT (whose just-released  album “Oakland in Blue” i was bumping on the drive up…buy it now!), Jamie DeWolf, Skim, the local SickSpits crew…like I said, a nice lineup. I came up after 2 hours of straight hip-hop, and if you’ve ever been “the poet” who comes up after 2 hours of breakers, emcees, and high-energy music…you know that can be like a midget trying to follow Shaquille O’Neal.

Fortunately, I’m a tall-ass midget.

And the audience was beyond amazing, more than willing to keep the high energy but let me change it at the same time. I did a full 30 minute set, and they were with me the whole time. Sometimes even more than me…those students were rocking the fuck out to spoken word

My homie, amazing poet and Youth Speaks alum, Muneeza Rizvi caught my set on video. Here’s a new piece for you on this Sunday afternoon. For all the writers, artists, and brilliant people I get to work with on the daily — this is for y’all. Thank you.