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Books by Al Young
Kinds of Blue /
Drowning in the Sea of Love: Musical Memoirs /
Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons /
Heaven
Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs
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Jazz Idiom /
Sitting Pretty /
Who Is Angelina? /
Seduction by Light
Snakes /
Blues Don't Change /
Geography of the Near Past /
The Song Turning Back Into Itself /
Things Ain't What They Used to Be
The Sound of Dreams Remembered /
Conjugal Visits
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Al Young is the
author of more than 22 books, including
Jazz Idiom:
Blueprints, Still and Frames (The Jazz Photography
of Charles L. Robinson),
Something About the Blues:
An Unlikely Collection of Poetry,
Coastal Nights
and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006,
The Sound
of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000, and
Heaven: Poems 1957-1990. Widely anthologized and
translated, his work has carried him throughout the
world (Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the whole of the
United States), and earned him praise from Jane
Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and
the New York Times. A beloved teacher, Young has taught
writing, literature and creativity at Stanford, the
University of California at Santa Cruz, San José State
University, and the University of Michigan. From 2005
through 2008 he served as poet laureate of California.
The Sea, The Sky, And You, And I, a poetry & jazz
CD came out this year from Bardo Digital.
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Al Young is the
award-winning author of several screenplays and more
than 15 books of poetry, non-fiction and fiction
including the novel and the musical memoirs,
Seduction by Light, and
Drowning in the Sea of Love. He travels
extensively, lecturing and reading from his work, which
has been widely translated.
Al Young—born May 31, 1939 at
Ocean Springs, Mississippi
on the Gulf Coast near
Biloxi—grew up in the rural South of
villages and small towns, and in urban, industrial
Detroit. From 1957-1960 he attended the University of
Michigan, where he co-edited Generation, the campus
literary magazine. In 1961 he emigrated to the San
Francisco Bay Area. Settling at first in Berkeley, he
held a variety of colorful jobs (folksinger, lab aide,
disk jockey, medical photographer, clerk typist,
employment counselor) before graduating with honors from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Spanish. His marriage in
1963 to technical writer and editor Arline Young was
blessed with one child: their son Michael, born in 1971.
From 1969-1976 he was Edward B. Jones Lecturer in
Creative Writing at
Stanford
near Palo Alto, where he lived and worked for
three decades. In
the Y2K year 2000 he returned to Berkeley, where he
continues to freelance.
Young has taught poetry, fiction
writing and American literature at Stanford, U.C.
Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Davis, Bowling Green
State University, Foothill College, the Colorado
College, Rice University, the University of Washington,
the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas,
San José State University, where he was appointed the
2002
Lurie Distinguished
Professor of Creative Writing, and Charles
University in the Czech Republic under the auspices of
the
Prague Summer Programs. In the spring of 2003 he
taught poetry at Davidson College (Davidson, NC), where
he was
McGee Professor in Writing.
In the fall of 2003, as the first
Coffey Visiting Professor
of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University
in Boone, NC, he taught a poetry workshop. From
2003-2006 he served on the faculty of
Cave Canem’s
summer workshop retreats for African American poets.
For more information, go to
www.alyoung.org.
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Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons
Poems 2001-2006: The Poetry of Al Young
By Al
Young
Five
years of short poetry from California's Poet
Laureate. Al Young's poetry covers a wide
range of subjects from a short euology to
Rudolph Diesel (of diesel engine fame) to
dawn at the Oakland airport when you've
missed your plane, from the poor in San
Francisco to the military in Washington.
We are living in a time when not much poetry
is being published. It is good to see that
once in a while a publisher will take the
risk to put out a book like this. We, and
especially our children, need to be reminded
that there is more to putting words together
than the simple writing projects in school. |
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Heaven
By Al
Young
The largess of this book (nearly 300 poems)
matches the sensibility of the poetry that
is devised with broad brushstrokes and
unrestricted affection for the ordinary
world. Young ( Seduction by Light ) is
interested in everything from Li Po to
Nijinsky, from the Rolling Stones to John
Coltrane. The geographic reach of the
collection stretches from Brooklyn to Paris,
Los Angeles, Mississippi, Poland, Stockholm
and Detroit. From the beginning, Young's
work was affected by the black experience
and the first poems focus on "dilettante"
militants, jazz musicians and important
distinctions between black and white: "When
white people speak of being uptight /
theyrestet talking about dissolution &
deflection / but when black people say
uptight / they mean everything's all right."
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This poetry is "uptight," full of play, openness, a
certain kind of ease. Young rejects blind anger, which
segregates; his instruction to a friend is succinct:
"Nor must you let the great haters / of our time /
rattle in your heart." The introduction presents a
diverse list of poets who have influenced Young,
including Mayakovsky, Lorca and LeRoi Jones. There is
also some of the dreamy parody of Frank O'Hara at work
here.—Publishers
Weekly
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Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs
By Al
Young
and Janet Coleman
A
double-barreled memoir from two writers who
were befriended by Charles Mingus during the
late 1950s. Both Coleman and Young revered
the composer, who (in Coleman's words)
"viewed music as an elixir, an antidote to
the poison, [and] a religious calling." But
they're not too reverent to overlook
Mingus's eccentricities, which included
hitting the streets of New York with a bow,
a quiver, and a suitcase full of extra
arrows. This is a funny, touching, and
instructive book.—Amazon.com
Review |
Freelance writer Coleman and prolific
author Young (Sitting Pretty , etc.), both devotees of
Charles Mingus (1922-1979), here present an
unconventional, nonchronological, anecdotal,
impressionistic account of the personality and
contributions of the great jazz bassist and composer.
They met him in 1960 when they were students at the
University of Michigan, and for the next 20 years, until
Mingus died in Mexico, their lives and his were
inextricably joined. Captivated by the violent
musician--"the Marlon Brando and the Laurence Olivier of
Jazz"--whose over-indulgence and self-destruction were
balanced by a gentle generosity, Coleman and Young
reveal a vibrant, wonderfully complex man who expanded
traditional jazz forms, encouraged improvisation,
established the first jazz musicians' cooperative and
was an impassioned, outspoken foe of racism.—Publishers Weekly
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Sitting Pretty
By Al
Young
As Sit tells it, his life in and around San
Francisco is based on a simple philosophy:
"Play all the possibilities and stagger your
bets." Al Young deserves high marks for his
novel that makes one think twice about
success and failure in life.—Paul
Obluda, The San Francisco Examiner
Sitting Prettyis
long-time poet and novelist Al Young's novel
from the mid-70s that has been reissued in
1986. |
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Spoken, for it seems more grounded in the oral than
the written tradition, by Sidney J. Prettymon, a. k.
a.
Sitting Pretty,
this novel set in the San Francisco Bay Area is rich
in local color, authentic, and thoroughly enjoyable.
The surface of the book is bright and clear, written
as it is in the black idiom, with underpinnings rich
in emotional tones.
Sitting Pretty
covers one year in the life of the narrator. The
book opens with Sitting Pretty living in the Blue
Jay Hotel in Palo Alto, a place that caters to those
down on their luck, such as Miz Duchess, a tough but
lovable Cherokee woman who dines on Alpo; Willie G.,
who goes from working in the junk yard to
fashionable security guard at a modem art museum
back to the junk yard; Broadway, a flashy young man
who ends up busted for cocaine; and the silent and
intuitive Professor.
The exploits of these secondary characters pate,
however, in comparison to those of the narrator, who
fights the battle of the bottle, not always winning,
but always fighting with humor; who goes to jail for
unpaid parking tickets and gets bailed out by his
lawyer son; who establishes contact with his wife
after years of neglect only to discover that she has
developed cancer; who is offered a job pitching T.V.
and radio shows and becomes famous in the process;
who has a tryst with the enigmatic Marguerite of
exclusive Atherton, a black woman who passes for
white; and who ends up hanging out at Jo Jo's Let's
Get It On Club where he begins to cultivate an
interest in JoJo, the proprietor as well as expose
himself to some young, hip, radical black poetry.
The action keeps the book going along at a fast
clip, but the value of Sitting Pretty is in the
narrator's "philosophizin." His insights are
grounded in the experience of black America, yet
they are universal enough to make this a novel of
wide appeal.—Independent
Publisher
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Jazz Idiom: Blueprints, Stills, and Frames
The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson
By
Charles L. Robinson and Al Young and Charles
Robinson
The
jazz greats, as photographed on stage and
behind the scenes Thirty-nine jazz
luminaries are captured in this book,
including Julian Cannonball Adderley, Louis
Bellson, Ray Brown, Miles Davis, Duke
Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Hodges,
Carmen McRae, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone,
and Anita O Day. |
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Poet Laureate
of California Al Young riffs, scats, and bebops his
way across the page, providing poetry, anecdotes,
and insight into the players and the moments in
question. Photographer Charles L. Robinson was a
friend to many of the musicians photographed and, as
a result, often caught them in moments of candor and
intimacy. For a time, he was the official staff
photographer of the Monterey Jazz Festival, and
while the majority of the shots in this book are
from the festival, a number of them are from Bay
Area jazz venues. In Robinson s photographs, we see
artists rehearsing before a set: Charlie Mingus,
goateed and pensive, hunched over a Steinway,
phrases dancing in his head. Or the legendary Earl
Fatha Hines at the Monterey Jazz Festival, in the
groove, the original cool cat in sunglasses (back
before Ray Charles was even born) and famous for
breaking the bass strings of a piano. We see Muddy
Waters and Jimmy Rushing backstage, talking about
some time back in the day. We see Milt Jackson and
Dizzy Gillespie sharing a joke. When the last blue
note of a performance is but a memory, and the smoke
cascades up to the beams of a club at two in the
morning, Robinson is there.—Publisher,
Heyday Books
Charles L.
Robinson, born in 1934 and raised in Baltimore,
earned a B.A. in biological science as well an M.S.
in vocational rehabilitation counseling from
California State University, San Francisco. At the
invitation of Ralph J. Gleason, Robinson became the
staff photographer of the Monterey Jazz Festival for
several years. He currently contributes his time to
community work in the San Francisco Bay Area and
lives in Berkeley with his wife, Sarah. Al Young is
the author of more than twenty books of poetry,
fiction, and nonfiction and has taught writing and
literature at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz,
and the University of Michigan. The recipient of
Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright fellowships, he lives
in Berkeley and is presently the Poet Laureate of
California
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Who Is Angelina?
By Al Young
"Through Angelina, Young looks at a
variety of problems facing young
Black women today. . . . I don't
always agree with Young's
conclusions, but they are honest and
they work."—Janice
C. Simpson, Essence
"Urban blues, race, the need for
roots and love these are
commonplaces that Mr. Young
renovates with a fresh aspect. His
characters are invested with a pithy
eloquence that makes the clashing of
ideas a pure delight."—Martin
Levin, New York Times Book Review
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Young, Black, University of
California educated, and dangerously back in love,
Angelina Green is forced to make choicesintimate,
political, and spiritualas she struggles to bring
coherence and direction to her zigzag,
roller-coaster Berkeley life.—University
of California Press
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Seduction by Light
By Al Young
Poet and jazz
critic Young's fifth novel resembles a Victorian
picaresque in its loquaciousness and sense of
adventure. Mamie Franklin, once a singer and
actress, and now a domestic for a Beverly Hills
family, describes, in her own humble and honest
voice, the troubles that beset her around the time
of the death of her lover Burley Cole. Burglars
break into her house, Burley visits her as a ghost
and she faints during a major earthquake. But with
resilience and faith she survives. A bit of a mystic
and philosopher, Mamie keeps her sometimes
insightful and always endearing views of America,
Hollywood, success and failure and a lot more
flowing steadily. While not all the personalities
here are as remarkable as Mamie, the novel succeeds
on the strength of her wit and humor alone. Young
does not flinch from taking her outrageous tale
further into the world of the supernatural; however,
the fictional Mamie's connections to our real world
are so tenacious, and Young so knowledgeable, that
his book becomes a compendium of black-American
culture as well.—Publishers
Weekly
In language as fresh, sassy, and homespun as
Huckleberry Finn's, former singer/actress Mamie
Franklin recounts her last months' adventures as
part-time maid and full-time psychic in Santa
Monica, California. With the guidance of Ben
Franklin, the 18th-century wizard whose spirit first
appeared to her as a child in Mississippi, Mamie
tries to cope with the death of her companion,
Burley Coles, and to reconcile her son Benjie with
his fatherall the while falling in love with the
gifted young Theo. Slipping easily between this and
the nether worlds, the wise and witty Mamie radiates
a rare, irreverent joy. A fifth novel for Young,
also a poet and blues musician.—Charles
C. Nash, Library Journal
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Snakes
Here I thought
I'd discovered an unknown writer—Ha! Turns out that
Al Young is a poet, a novelist, a creative writing
teacher, and a genuine intellectual (check out his
website, which is easy to find).
Snakes is Al Young's first novel, featuring African
Americans in Sixties Detroit who speak a colorful
version of English and don't have too much hope for
the future. Drugs, music, and even a little bit of
sex are included, as this is the story of a poor but
honest lad who becomes a pretty good guitar player.
Definitely a readable book, but it won't change your
life. It's worth it, though, to learn about a man
called Al Young.—James
A. Shea
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Al Young: Lunch Poems
California Poet
Laureate Al Young has created a profound and
enduring body of work that represents our time.
Young's numerous publications in poetry, fiction,
nonfiction, and for the stage and screen explore the
American, human condition through the lens of the
individual voice. Tune in as he reads a selection of
his poems before a live audience at UC Berkeley.
(#11155)
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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