When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all.

President Obama appears to me to have elevated and implemented the artist-activist concept to the role of empowered servant-leader.

It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the idea of black men as subjects of not just racial profiling but of an insidious form of racial obliteration sanctioned by silence.

Although himself frequently a target of guerrilla decontextualization, a major part of the meaning of Michael Jackson's life was to help balance the accumulation of horrors with something closer to love in its most empowering and healing sense.

The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

From her gospel-singing mother Cissy Houston, her legendary pop-diva cousin Dionne Warwick, and her Queen of Soul godmother Aretha Franklin, she [Whitney Houston] inherited gifts for skillfully interpreting lyrics and endowing them with new depth and jeweled nuance.