NATHANIEL MACKEY, D.S.MARRIOTT, WAYDE COMPTON
THE POETRY CENTER and the luggage store
present
$5-10 sliding scale donation, no one refused for lack of funds
1007 market street (nr 6th)
three outstanding poets from Canada, Britian and the US (Bay Area)
NATHANIEL MACKEY (USA) with HAFEZ MODIRZADEH (saxaphone)
D.S. MARRIOTT (UK)
WAYDE COMPTON (CANADA)
NATHANIEL MACKEY™S newest book won the National Book Award for 2006, Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006), and forms the next installment of two ongoing serial poems he has been writing for over 20 years: Song of the Andoumboulou and œMu. Mackey co-edited wtih Art Lange, Moment™s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993) and produced the poetry cd, Strick in collaboration with Hafez Modiradeh and Royal Hartigan. His longtime radio program on Santa Cruz public radio station KSUP, Tanganyika Strut spotlights a dense amalgam of African and African American, Middle Eastern, Asian,
European, West Indian and South American music. He has authored two collections of critical prose, Paracritical Hinge and Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross Culturality and Experimental Writing. He has completed three novels in a series titled, œFrom a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. For three decades, Mackey has edited the literary journal, Hambone and is a professor at UC Santa Cruz. in 2001, he was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.
HAFEZ MODIRZADEH
Saxophonist and composer Hafez Modirzadeh has collaborated with the likes of Don Cherry, Peter Apfelbaum, and Fred Ho, and has been recorded on more than a dozen releases, including the seminal 1993 In Chromodal Discourse and the critically acclaimed 1996 work The People™s Blues, as well as the soundtrack for the
Mirimax film release of Kevin Spacey™s Albino Alligator. His invention of the œchromodal method allows for a nonlinear improvisational practice which is able to adapt and incorporate multiple systems of music, permitting a cross-cultural œconversation between instruments, performers, and musical idioms. Born in 1962 of an Iranian father and European-American mother, Modirzadeh grew up in France and the U.S., identifying strongly with African-American blues and jazz as well as the rich traditions of classical Iranian music. Today, he is a renowned scholar in ethnomusicology, whose writings have been published in numerous journals, as well as in his book The Chromodal Approach to Improvised Music (Spartan Books Press, 1996). He is the recipient of two NEA Jazz Fellowships as wellas an Artist-in-Residence Grant from the California Arts Council.
D S MARRIOTT
British poet, D.S. Marriott is the author of Incognegro (Salt Publications, 2006), and two cultural studies, On Black Men (Columbia University Press, 2000) and Haunted Life (Rutgers University Press, 2007). He teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
WAYDE COMPTON
is a Vancouver writer and editor whose books include 49th Parallel Psalm, Performance Bond and Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. He and Jason de Couto perform turntable-based sound poetry as a duo called The Contact Zone Crew. Compton is also a co-founding member of the Hogan™s Alley Memorial Project, an organization dedicated to preserving the public memory of Vancouver™s original black community. (See HAMP™s blog here.) Wayde Compton teaches in
Simon Fraser University™s Writing and Publishing Program, where he is a creative writing instructor in The Writer™s Studio ; he also teaches English composition and literature at Coquitlam College and Kwantlen University College