New Video: “Why I Write (# 137)”

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.