Suheir Hammad, "First Writing Since"
Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet, author and political activist who was born on October 1973 in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugee parents and immigrated with her family to Brooklyn, New York City, when she was five years old. Her parents later moved to Staten Island. She is the winner of numerous awards, including The Audre Lorde Writing Award from Hunter College (1995, 2000), The Morris Center for Healing Poetry Award (1996), New York Mills Artist Residency (1998), Van Lier Fellowship (1999), The 2001 Emerging Artist Award, Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute at NYU, The TONY Award — Special Theatrical Event — original cast member and writer for Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway (2003). Suheir is also a talent associate for the Peabody Award winning HBO show Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry (2003).
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The Spoken Word and Progressive Politics
Howard Zinn, the beloved people's historian and longtime Progressive columnist who died on January 27, 2010, was a brilliant storyteller. He told the stories "not of the heroes and achievements of traditional history, but of all those people who were the victims of those achievements, who suffered silently or fought back magnificently": the labor radicals, the early feminists, the anti-war soldiers. Zinn also believed in people telling their own stories in their own voices. He believed in the power of artists to reshape the larger political narrative towards social justice and solidarity.
Today, a new generation of artists and activists has emerged, using their words as weapons for radical discourse and political empowerment. Coming out of the era of Reaganomics and gentrification, in the traditions of Amiri Baraka and Lenny Bruce, a movement of spoken word artists is speaking up. They combine elements of free verse, hip-hop, stand-up comedy, and soap-box preaching, but connecting them all is a diverse, democratic art form that demands participation. Spoken word is about the call and response, re-definition and self-determination, the street corner and Capitol Hill.
In this series, we are going to present a range of spoken word artists, musicians, and storytellers, all of whom are using their voices to rewrite the American narrative -- one story, many people at a time. As Howard would say, "Let the people speak."
— Josh Healey
Spoken Word Editor for The Progressive
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