DuEwaWorld News! by DuEwa Frazier

When you reminisce over hip hop, where do your thoughts take you? Do you think about the night you went to the roller rink with your friends and you heard NWA's "Express Yourself" pumping loud from the DJ booth, inspiring you to dance to the 70's beats in the song? Or maybe you think about the times you chilled out at the park in your car, with your boyfriend or girlfriend when L.L. Cool J.'s "I Need Love" played on the radio? If you're like me, you may reminisce about your college days: the parties in the student union, the walks with your friends across the bridge to the nearby store, the sorority and fraternity step shows. All of these memories have hip hop wrapped around them. We lived, loved and laughed, riding on the beats of songs by old school and new school hip hop artists. Within the pages of The Message: 100 Life Lessons From Hip Hop's Greatest Songs , author Felicia Pride shares similar memories with us and invokes our hip hop laced ...

On Thursday, November 15th I interviewed both Founder of Third World Press , Haki Madhubuti and Randall Horton , Editor of Fingernails Across the Chalkboard (Third World Press). I initially schedule to speak with Dr. Madhubuti for fifteen minutes or so, but he was quite busy earlier in that day preparing for his trip to New York. My interview on Thursday started off with Randall Horton, a poet, author, Ph.D. student and editor of the April 2007 Third World Press anthology, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard , a work centering upon HIV/AIDS in the Black Diaspora. Randall was quite interesting to talk to and he informed me that he began his relationship with Third World Press while he was an MFA student in Creative Writing at Chicago State University (where Dr. Madhubuti is a Distinguised Professor). Randall spoke fondly of Dr. Madhubuti, as he described how the Third World Press family supported his moving from Washington, D.C. to Chicago, so that he could pursue graduate student. Ra...

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Dr. Donda West. I am sure that Kanye and his family are in deep mourning at this time. Our prayers go out. No one wants to lose a loved one, especially a mother! I felt a kinship to Dr. West knowing that she was an English professor and recently wrote a book about her life and raising Kanye. Also a former boss of mine, Dr. Brenda Greene, an English professor at Medgar Evers College (CUNY), interviewed Dr. West for Black Issues Book Review last spring. The interview was related to the release of Raising Kanye: Life Lessons From the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar . I always marvel at parents who are educators and artists, who raise their children to be literate and creative. And this is what Donda West did as a single parent. I have seen countless interviews of her on television with Kanye, I was routing for this highly educated black woman to have some time off after working 31+ years as an educator, to enjoy her life, and enjoy the frui...

Well here I am the drama kid seeking drama - and I found it! Yesterday, Sundary November 11th I finally got a chance to see 365 Plays by Suzan Lori Parks here in New York at The Public Theater. And would you believe it was FREE! Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find. I lived by it yesterday and it was great! I did arrive a few minutes late. The audience was laughing in an uproar. There must've been about 30 or so actors on the stage, all performing Parks' "Om" or "Ohm" play from 365 Days/365 Plays. The entire performance was about 1 hour. The funniest though was when one of the actors came out and addressed us, the audience to say "Thank you for coming to see 365 Plays, we have the playwright in the house to answer your questions..." The whole audience was aghast, it was something. It was like holding your breath and waiting to be told you're a lottery winner. We expected (secretly) that Suzan Lori Parks was coming out the...

I really enjoyed myself at the event I participated in yesterday: Read Out Loud! Family Literacy Festival. It was sponsored by Jumpstart , an organization for youth and Morningside Alliance . Both organizations produce community-based events and programming for schools and families. I found out about the event when my friend and fellow author, Jerry Craft asked if I wanted to take part in it since the organizers were looking for a poet. I was booked for the event to do a signing for my books , as well as to run a poetry activity table for the kids. It was a whole lot of fun. My table stayed busy with the cutest little kids! Little ones as young as three and four came to my table, crowding around me with their smiles, their stares and their little hands. I read several children's picture books of poetry to them, I guided them through a poetry writing activity and shared some of my own poetry with them. The children were quite attentive, well behaved and smart! For the sma...

This sounds like a mighty fine award: BCALA Literary Awards Publishers Announcement TO ALL PUBLISHERS: The Literary Awards Committee of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) is now accepting submissions for the annual BCALA Literary Awards. The Committee will present two prizes of $500.00 each for books written by African American authors: one in adult Fiction and one in Nonfiction. Honor Book citations are also given in fiction and nonfiction. In addition, the Literary Awards Committee will present the First Novelist Award for outstanding achievement in writing and storytelling by a first time fiction writer and the Outstanding Contribution to Publishing citation to an author and/or publishing company for unique books that offer a positive depiction of African Americans. First presented at the Second National Conference of African American Librarians in 1994, the BCALA Literary Awards acknowledge outstanding works of fiction and nonfiction for adult audiences by...