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Books by Naomi Ayala
Wild Animals on the Moon
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This Side of Early
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Naomi
Ayala – Biosketch
Naomi
Ayala makes her residence in Washington, DC where, until recently,
she served as the coordinator for curriculum and instruction at
the National Council of La Raza's Center for Community Educational
Excellence, and the Program Director for Celebra la Ciencia: The Hispanic Community Science Festivals Project
of the Self Reliance Foundation and the Hispanic Radio Network.
As
a freelance writer and consultant, Ms. Ayala currently helps
develop, edits and promotes curricula and other educational
materials – in both her native Spanish as well as English –
for innovative education programs and national organizations.
She runs professional development workshops for teachers,
conducts specialized residencies in public and private schools
(K-12), while presenting her poetry to diverse audiences around
the U.S.
She is a member of the Board of Directors of Teaching for Change, and serves as an advisor on its Teaching for
Equity advisory board.
Ms.
Ayala is the author of one book of poetry,
Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone, 1997), selected by the New
York City Public Library as one of 1999’s Books
for the Teen Age.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and
anthologies around the U.S. and beyond – among them, Callaloo, The Village Voice,
The Caribbean Writer, The
Massachusetts Review, Red
River and Potomac Reviews, Hanging
Loose, and Terra
Incognita.
Ms.
Ayala is the recipient of the 2001 Larry Neal Writers Award for
Poetry of the District of Columbia’s Commission on the Arts and
Humanities, received Special Congressional Recognition for
Community Service from U.S. Congresswoman Rosa deLauro, the Connecticut Latinas in Leadership Award, the Trailblazer Arts Award, and the 2000 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award.
During
a 1,000+ mile hike of the Appalachian Trail in the spring of 2000,
Ms. Ayala walked from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Wingdale,
New York.
She values the outdoors – supports the efforts of women
to connect with their bodies – and celebrates the sacred
connection between the individual and the earth.
Contact:
Naomi Ayala -- Riverword@msn.com
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This Side of Early
Poems by
Naomi Ayala
Naomi Ayala’s
poems explore wide-ranging themes in an
ever-changing landscape—from the city streets to the
introspective solace of the woods. These lyrics
deconstruct the political world of man, offer hope
through a compelling, lyrical, spiritual intimacy,
and bridge the gap between the two with words full
of ecological intensity.
Her deep
connections with the working class combine with a
love of the land to offer us lilt and dream,
revelation and foretelling.
In
This Side of Early, Naomi Ayala exhibits
astonishing range, proving that great poetry is
worth waiting for. Like Whitman, Ayala contains
multitudes; she is a poet with an ethereal vision of
another world, and a woman with a sweet hope for
this one: “Drink from this tree/and ye shall be
saved."—Honorée
Fanonne Jeffers, author of
Red Clay Suite |
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Hole
By Naomi Ayala
One morning
they dig up the sidewalk and leave.
No sign of the truck—only the large,
dark shadow digging and digging,
piling up sludge with a hand shovel
beside the only tree.
Two o’clock I come by
and he’s slumbering in the grass beside rat holes.
Three and he’s stretched across a jagged stonewall,
folded hands tucked beneath one ear—
a beautiful young boy smiling,
not the heavy, large shadow who can’t breathe.
Four-thirty and the August heat
takes one down here.
He’s pulled up an elbow joint
some three feet round.
At seven I head home for the night,
pass the fresh gravel mound,
a soft footprint near the manhole
like the “x” abuelo would place beside his name
all the years he couldn’t write. |
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Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical
Music
By
Amiri Baraka
For
almost half a century,
Amiri Baraka
has ranked among the most important
commentators on African American music and
culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his
writings on music, the first such collection
in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends
autobiography, history, musical analysis,
and political commentary to recall the
sounds, people, times, and places he's
encountered. As in his earlier classics,
Blues People and
Black Music, Baraka offers essays on
the famous--Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles
Davis, John Coltrane--and on those whose
names are known mainly by jazz
aficionados--Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and
Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style,
with its deep roots in poetry, makes
palpable his love and respect for his jazz
musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm
show us again how much Coltrane, Albert
Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers
mattered. He brings home to us how music
itself matters, and how musicians carry and
extend that knowledge from generation to
generation, providing us, their listeners,
with a sense of meaning and belonging. |
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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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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.
The drama, poignancy, and romance of a
classic immigrant saga pervade this
book, hold the reader in its grasp, and
resonate long after the reading is done.
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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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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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updated
9 April 2008
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