2023-08-19 03:52
The original impulse to write is probably alot like the beginning of the Tao Teh Ching, where it is stated that the Tao that can be spoken of is not the original Tao. Words rise up fro… Read More
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Free Black Space Blog
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Free Black space discusses African American history, culture, and current events.
2023-08-19 03:40
Dear Editor,I was published by you guys a while back.I figured I'd give a shot. I think paying to submit is like lottery tickets, but the odds are probably a little bit better. B… Read More
2023-04-17 08:54
My approach to Baldwin has changed a bit. I had forgotten in this essay he talks about white supremacy.I still admire and respect his work very much, but the secret complement gets an… Read More
2023-03-12 21:59
Blues after the Resurrection You would think the bloomIs just beginning, but bloodIs in the red, last summerI dunked my head in the blues Believe it or not, I still bruiseToo easil… Read More
2023-03-03 11:20
Aristotle's division between the rhetoric and the poetics serves as a line of demarcation between society's employment of argument and story as a tool used to manage realtionships between hu… Read More
2023-03-03 11:08
GrimyLike hot sauce, grits, saltpeppaketchupam what I am do what I doshout out to the black poets crewgod made dirt and it don't hurtput it in your mouth and let it work Read More
2023-02-17 21:42
I am currently a Professor at Bowie State University in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, where I teach Composition, Creative Writing and Poetry.Prior to that I f… Read More
2022-08-18 16:40
I posted this photo Facebook and it received quite a few shares and hits, so I figured I'd give the context here.The photo pictures Karla and Yao Glover founders of Karibu Books, which… Read More
2022-08-16 18:32
All These Black Hands11.22.2020(for Mom, Dad, Caryl, and Dr. Thompson and the MedStar Colonoscopy team)healing meholding me thru ittelling meImmo be alrightgiving and takingbloodanesth… Read More
2022-08-16 16:40
The Badass Everybody knows somebody Black who never seems to stay in their place. Often this begins in the home, at the heart of the community. Bold Black folks never fit into the second-cl… Read More
2022-08-16 16:24
The Runaway Runaways are tricky. We all want to run away from something. Some of us follow through with it. Some of us don’t. But all of us have dreamed of turning tail and cutting out… Read More
2022-08-16 16:05
On August 9, 2022, Serena Williams announced her plan to retire in Vogue. I have followed her and her sister’s storied career since they were kids. Like the way I felt about Mike Tyson… Read More
2022-08-16 10:53
There's a secret in blackness. A mystery that transcends the whatever opposition we know. A water in it that resists flame. There is in it a thing that does not burn, that… Read More
2022-07-29 05:40
One could call me an academic; but anybody that knows me knows I am not. Or then again, maybe I am. The title is at least fluid. But here's one thing I've learned abou… Read More
2022-07-28 15:34
Occasionally, I will run across an article on staying in the now or a celebrity like meme that reminds us to stay in the present moment and take charge of our lives. The Dal… Read More
2022-06-12 16:21
Just about thirteen years ago, when we began Free Black Space we imagined a need for a digital media platform that could articulate the changes in the concept of blackness as it operated in… Read More
2022-06-06 03:17
Love Song Before I was born and born to an ambition, my father dreamedmy mother as the woman he would one day love, not knowing her faceor the innocence she cultivated like a small cup o… Read More
2022-06-04 19:42
koan #18: working on what’s spoiled if your mother hurts yoube gentle with the memorygently untangle the knotsas though her hair was like a white woman’slong and stringy, unrave… Read More
2022-05-11 05:24
My Father Speaks of His Father.If you did not resistMay’s light might sing different.There’s still spring in the battlefieldsAnd everywhere there is blood.Underneath everyt… Read More
2022-05-05 19:31
Work on the redefinition of Black for many may seem to be an outdated task. It is highly unlikely that anyone engaging in such an endeavor is likely to achieve success. The problem of black… Read More
2021-12-30 23:20
The Wuhan Soundtrack- Louis Armstrong But for real, for real, the real soundtrack here is the language I don't speak filling the air and swirling around me. I hear it like background m… Read More
2021-10-06 02:36
Most people imagine race has nothing to do with math.That may even be the reason we like race. For when talking about race all the mathematical proofs seem to go out the window… Read More
2021-10-02 20:34
I can hear my daughter's voice in my head talking about appropriating culture. She's what I think they call a millenial. I am not sure exactly what that means; but every time I replay… Read More
2021-10-02 19:19
Thought a little about the FBS years. When we started Free Black Space the world was under the shadow of Obama-folks was saying post-racial. Talking about blackness seemed alm… Read More
2021-08-28 02:28
The personal often seems to be the easiest way to get to an Authentic Black. I think this is a symptom of the remnant of slavery that invalidates African American gathering and union.When A… Read More
2021-08-06 13:15
Reading a little about Chinese cars, followed a thread after I read some of a New York Times article about Biden and electric cars.Didn't know China was the largest car producer in the… Read More
2021-08-06 03:10
So Kenyatta Dorey Graves shared a post about the MacAurthur foundation's grants to fight anti-blackness.My personal experience with the Free Black Space years gives some insight into w… Read More
2021-07-01 22:10
To Write and Sell Words Dull unwashed windows of eyesAnd buildings of industry. WhatIndustry do I practice? A slickColored boy, 12 miles from his Home. I practice no industry.I am no longe… Read More
2021-05-26 22:52
I have my students read sections of the Tao Teh Ching and Art of War in my composition courses at Bowie State University. I consider it an introd… Read More
2021-05-17 01:06
I always get these e-mails from Harvard University about how Taiji is scientifically proven to be good for health and other things. I always find it amusing. I practice Taiji often. Every on… Read More
2021-02-25 07:42
I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine. As ludicrous as it may sound, I made the statement Americans don't study. My friend's reply was what do you mean? what are all the… Read More
2021-02-21 07:47
I’m totally amazed by the American trend towards activism. The country is divided as ever, and it seems the Right and Left camps are both committed to some version of it. Activism has… Read More
2021-01-23 16:31
Given the responses to Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem. I figured I would post this essay, which was the introduction to a work called Poet's America, published about seven years ago, b… Read More
2021-01-17 17:38
One Shoe Marching Towards HeavenOne Shoe is a different type of book. The introduction is written by Rion Scott one of the most dynamic fiction writers in the country.The heart of the… Read More
2021-01-17 16:07
The Free Black Space charge eventually became a quest to decode the black and how it operates in the mind. Of all things the black seems unscientific. We know race and… Read More
2021-01-14 16:58
White supremacy poses that white people are more powerful than they are. Perhaps we should try looking at white supremacists as less powerful than they think they are.This might shrink… Read More
2021-01-07 11:32
Years ago we did a Free Black Space Blog post on articles written by Jelani Cobb and Ta-Nehisi Coates on white supremacist and Dixiecrats. What I found interesting back then was the sa… Read More
2020-08-19 16:20
Always thinking about a Black Book Future.How will we develop books and ideas that feed black readers?How will we distribute them? Black writers are reluctant to tell stories of the… Read More
2020-08-07 07:28
Let's not forget Malcolm X was killed. Martin Luther King, Jr. too. We could imagine them as black bodies fallen on the timeline of history; but that seems, even for the least radical of u… Read More
2020-06-16 00:53
Editors,Yeah I just scribbled some unedited notes to you guys. There are probably going to be more calls like yours. Over the years I have taken time to call out editor… Read More
2020-05-05 12:08
Empire of Language- Finale-Loving You is Complicated.So build buildagain the newvillages; youmust mix spittlewith dirt, dungto saliva.....Edward Kamau Braithwaite From the ArrivantsPoems are… Read More
2020-04-16 18:01
The article is from the Economist, not FreeBlackSpace. One might ask-China is winning what? I've said for a while African-Americans should work to increase their knowledge of Chinese cultu… Read More
2020-04-15 19:12
Brief Notes On a Qigong Practice by Terence NicholsonSifu Nicholson's Masters:Pei Xirong & Liu XiaolingI learned Wudang Qigong from Grandmaster Liu Xiaoling (18th Gen Wudang Longmen). He… Read More
2020-04-06 21:29
Women and Writers“Ahh this new podcast by V Efua Prince is extraordinary! Deeply felt and honest and revealing and compassionate.”—Kerry NevilleListen to the podc… Read More
2020-04-05 13:51
I listened to parts of a Black Book Eco-System Forum that featured some of the heavy weights of the Black Book Industry discussing Black Bookstores, Publishing, and Infrastructure in the age… Read More
2020-04-02 03:29
The riddle of the day is the officers without guns. Their uniforms don't seem as tight as in the States. I can't make out the meaning of the insignias pasted on their chest and look more at… Read More
2020-04-02 02:33
1. The Mis-Education of the Negro, By Carter G. Woodson. The classic bestseller and must read that investigates the particulars and pitfalls of Black Education. Woodson was the founder… Read More
2020-03-30 01:05
My son hits me up to tell me about a black smog in China. He don't really text me like that these days. His dad is another country not working for the U.S. Government or the military at the… Read More
2020-03-28 01:54
The limit of words is the living breathing lives of human beings, the flux of nature, and the interplay between the forces regulated by natural law.The world of humans, and the world of word… Read More
2020-03-27 01:25
Koan # 6 Heaven and water go their opposite ways:The image of CONFLICT.Thus in all his transactions the superior manCarefully considers the beginning.From the I-ChingI am a NegroAn err… Read More
2020-03-25 05:44
I know quite a few writers across a range of levels and in a variety of genres. Few of them are read. Even many of my heroes, some of them winners of prestigious fellowships and awards… Read More
2020-03-25 00:35
In 2009, the Ingram Content Group was formed as an umbrella to house a variety of operations dedicated to selling books. The new name reflected a change within the industry of publishing. Du… Read More
2020-03-23 15:09
Current day conflict within the humanities seems to center around questions of practicality. If one were to establish poles between the practical and impractical within the empire of langua… Read More
2020-03-20 14:19
Ta Nehisis Coates in his much lauded work Between the World in Me, travels to France. The journey itself is the journey into internationalism, predictable, naïve, and to be expect… Read More
2020-03-20 05:45
How we stop the black panthers?Ronald Reagan cooked up an answerYou hear that?What Gil Scott was hearingWhen our heroes and heroines got hooked on heroinCrack raised the murder rate in DC an… Read More
2019-11-05 02:04
The scholar will note the Slave Narrative as a distinctive moment in the development of African American Literature. There our voice, dipped in the dark ink of the I, emerged out of the edu… Read More
2019-09-23 02:50
I call my son, whose twenty-five, lives in Philly, and seems to have made his transition out of the American black male danger zone safely, to ask him about The Wire. Though I spent de… Read More
2019-09-14 01:26
Black Book Future is a GoFundMe that works towards the future of the black book. Black Bookstores, Free Black Spaces, and the free exchange of ideas outside of Academia are the fertil… Read More
2019-06-07 01:56
Given the recent success of so many African-American authors is it possible to envision a black press publishing a work that wins a major literary?It might be impossible or more Afro-Futuris… Read More
2019-06-04 15:19
Cecilia Haywoodby Jesse Alexander12/21/18(for the little brown girl who sang “I’m selling lollipops” in kindergarten and my Mother who kept my School Record scrapbook all t… Read More
2019-05-22 01:26
Poverty is not without its dignity, but to live in such a rich country and to be blessed as I am, one might doubt that truth. The expression is neither dignified or idealistic but nece… Read More
2019-05-22 00:50
I could be a Hotep or a Wakandan depending on the day. My name is Bro. Yao. The bro. stands for brother. Though I can't remember some past declaration to be a "brother" of… Read More
2019-04-27 00:55
Men had glimpsed, as my stepmother claimed, the algebra and alphabet of Nature, but knew nothing of feeling: men had charted Being and knew its mutations like the Periodic Table, but men wer… Read More
2019-04-20 12:28
I pitched an article to a few magazines not too long ago on China functioning as a new mother country for folks in Africa. African Americans and Americans often miss the obvious. … Read More
2019-03-26 04:00
It's cold as shit.The cold autumn winds have just begun in Wuhan. They come mixed with rain that falls day after day. It's more difficult than what I am used to. At home I… Read More
2019-03-16 14:52
"As Leslie Felder put it, we are all "imaginary Americans" for whom ranges of ethnicity represent not so much facts as roles, or what might best be called "necessary fictions." Ultimat… Read More
2019-03-16 14:15
1) Read incessantly and all across the board. Poetry is not basketball. Many poets live long lives, so you compete with the best from the beginning. Reading is daily practice and engagem… Read More
2019-03-02 00:31
The Free Black Space moment is almost perfectly in sync with the Obama Presidency and the subsequent rise of Trump. Though Free Black Space wasn't contemplating Obama in May of 2… Read More
2019-03-01 23:43
A few months ago, I read an interview by a famous African-American poet who joked that he was "not a practicing black". His comment is understandable given the aspiration towards the trans… Read More
2019-03-01 23:43
1) Free Black Space aims at engaging the complete bandwidth of the African American intellectual experience. We are clear that the diversity of our intellectual production existe… Read More
2019-02-25 22:54
Committed: Civil Rights and the Struggle for JusticeValerie Sweeney PrinceCivil rights were first constitutionalized in the 13th Amendment. However, the fact of civil rights as a… Read More
2019-02-04 19:33
Sanchez, Baraka, You, and Me in the Agesof Donald Trump and John Wayneadapted from the Afterword and Acknowledgments in This Past Was Waiting for Me by Sarah TrembathSankofa Love Project, 20… Read More
2019-02-04 19:27
Reading Poetry The adultress whispersBehind the pagesBegging him, stay.He grabs his pants,Slips out throughA stanza breakEnjambment manRun from fate,Juxtaposition of twoLoves, lyrically… Read More
2018-12-05 02:43
my dream starring the devil the river ran backwards and the music in the worldsounded like heavy metal and murder, my daddycame up from his grave and asked what the fuckis you doing son? and… Read More
2018-08-17 03:02
So my sojourn here is as much research as the wayward ramblings of a traveler. I move in and out of the city and with people without scholarship, fellowship, or institution I am affiliated w… Read More
2018-08-17 02:52
The world of blackness rumbles often but rarely with something like pure joy, If only we could get to Wakanda and vibranium and come at the problems super hero style. We al… Read More
2018-08-15 04:09
he list of folks that I have met and worked with at Bowie State University in the English Department is pretty prestigious. Rion Amilcar Scott and Reginald Dwayne Betts a… Read More
2018-08-07 01:42
Free Black Space always existed outside the trend. In many ways this has been a content production experiment in the digital age. We began in May of 2009 a little over a year after the… Read More
2018-07-13 13:25
I read an article by a Chinese undergraduate student on translation. A fair amount of the students I met in China were studying translation. For the Chinese the presence of their language… Read More
2018-07-02 14:27
I keep saying I'ma gonna head further South where the croakers, spots, and blues run. Maybe Solomon's Island, maybe Point Lookout; but I'm stuck on Lower Marlboro cuz the sunset there is to… Read More
2018-06-25 09:52
There's nothing perfect about China, but it sure is inspiring. For people in the world who know underdevelopment, gentrification or the economics of oppression it is at least worth a look.&n&hell…Read More
2018-06-24 18:11
A new patient of mine, who has come seeking assistance for “heart problems,” lamented that she had tried to drink such and such amount of tea everyday but it makes her feel prett… Read More
2018-06-20 02:00
I met with a Professor here in China who explained to me, "Westerner's imagine technology as the most advanced thing on the planet; but the most important technology is culture."It was a fee… Read More
2018-06-11 15:40
if there is dust on the furniture in my mother's house, the symbol is the lampshade, when the sun goes down, we turn the lights on, we wipe down. we concentrate.people… Read More
2018-05-24 03:38
Over the past few years I've grown into the habit of taking days to focus mainly on my Taiji practice. I began the habit in China, where I lived without my family for nine months. &hell…Read More
2018-05-22 01:48
Here at Free Black Space we revel in the Free Black. When we say that we mean free exchange of ideas, under radar, in the familiar/unfamiliar places, and we mean the people like those… Read More
2018-05-21 23:19
1) Yin and Yang/ Heaven and Earth should be meditated upon in comparison to Heaven and Hell and Good and Evil. The Tao Teh Ching and the I-Ching are worthy of study for a people… Read More
2018-05-19 00:10
A few months back I thought about the development of rhetoric in African American culture and the ways it adapts to and navigates black negation. I've been working on a larger essay, b… Read More
2018-05-18 23:58
whichcraft study the masters Lucille Cliftonwhen they speak of crafti wonder….if i am good enuff? if i am a Christian? if God knowsthe disaster? Tell me aboutthe di… Read More
2018-05-17 02:59
Hospital for the Negro Insane was a finalist in the Crab Orchard Review 2016 John Guyon LIterary Non-Fiction Prize.1.It’s a regular morning and I head out the neighborhood passing the… Read More
2018-05-16 17:18
I am getting my morning coffee at Starbucks (I ain't boycotting) and it must be the new moon-cuz the energy in the parking lot is crazy. People honking, rushing getting to work. Cars up on o… Read More
2018-03-25 18:29
From World War I To Pan-Africanism: Rayford Logan’s EvolutionRayford Whittingham Logan’s evolution into one of the most formidable and yet lesser known of the 20th Century Pan-Af… Read More
2018-03-24 18:11
summertime-after b.of epidemic love& low-hanging fruitthey said, make chaste womenof usof hot grit($)turkey melt depressiondeep-sugar, red lips & loosiesmy face against your bre… Read More
2018-03-24 18:07
RemnantsHours after your last leavingI resisted moving dishes to the sink.I watched remnants.Even cubes of iceseemed passively resignedto conformity in a glass,and all that fucking mingling… Read More
2018-03-24 17:39
the unpublished for Bill Kelly he knows with pipe slanted out of his mouth, sweet tobaccoand maybe too much cologne. the school&rs&hell…Read More
2018-03-24 00:56
It's been another rough day in Babylon as Ras would say. I say rough, but rough depends on how you look it at. Always a lot going on, but I guess it is how you look at it. How yo… Read More
2018-03-10 17:16
THE ALCHEMY OF BLACK FUTURES: BLACK COMICS, BLACK BEER CALENDARS & BLACK ICONOGRAPHYAs the information age gives way to the age of reckoning, where the dictates of nature will take prece… Read More
2018-03-09 15:51
The black panther is one of the most iconic symbols used by people of African descent. Majestic, sleek, regal, viral and fierce—not to mention unmistakably black—the a… Read More
2018-03-07 14:49
Below is a Poem from Samuel Miranda's New Collection Departures. Samuel is a a versatile visual artists, poet, and musician. Join him this Saturday March 10th 4-6 P.M. to v… Read More
2018-03-04 16:55
I am a Poet. I am an African American Poet.My son is a hip hop artist. He is eighteen years old.Much of my meditation these days is on the course of my son's development. H… Read More
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