James Arthur Baldwin, born August 2, 1924 to a Mr. and Mrs. David and Bertis Baldwin, was raised in Harlem, though his parents had lived in the deep south. “If they had waited two more seconds I might have been born in the south”, Baldwin once remarked.

Life for African-American families in these times was far from pretty, whether they lived north or south. Though part of this is the fault of society, much of the harshness in Baldwin’s own childhood originated from the …

About four years ago my wife and son and I went to Washington D.C. to visit my aunt and uncle who live there, and also to take our son to many of the museums, historical sites, and government buildings which are located there. We toured the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, The Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian Institute - you name it, we saw it. But the thing that really stayed in my son’s mind was a small group of people just outside the White …

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. His father was a travelling shoe salesman. Williams and the rest of his family lived in the rectory with their grandfather, who was the town’s Episcopal minister. At the age of twelve his family moved to St. Louis, where his father was offered a job at a factory.

The depression hit when Williams was in his twenties, so he was forced to work in the factory to help support his family. Williams …

Percussive raindrops beat like anticipation on the sidewalk outside the Bowery Poetry Club. People came in from the streets dripping with water and generally looking like they had been swimming in their clothes. There was energy popping in the air as musicians set up their instruments, and poets passed their poems to each other for last-minute critical review. On any other night, the cold winter rain might’ve put a chill on the spirit of things. But not on Wednesday, December 11th.

Torrential downpours be damned, there …

I rarely play clubs anymore, but I was asked by four different people to play at the Bowery Poetry Club. On December 3, my trio will accompany poet Ray McNiece, former writer in residence of the Kerouac Writer’s Residence in Orlando, which I helped get started. After playing music for Ray with my trio, I will play a set of my own. Ray is an outstanding poet, scholar, teacher and ambassador for Spoken Word at its finest. I was honored to be asked by …

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

-Han Shan (Cold Mountain)

In 1954, in a scene he described in his book, “The Dharma Bums,”(pp 18-21) Jack Kerouac visited the Berkley shack of his new friend and Ur-Dharma Bum, …

Spanning a period from 1939 to the present, Richard Powers remarkable new book, The Time of Our Singing, delves with a Janusian eye into history, through World War II and Vietnam to present time; its radar tracking racism, scientific theories of time, music’s evolution and the emotional lives of three generations of one family profoundly effected by it all.

The young couple meets at the Washington mall in 1939 at the epochal performance of Marian Anderson, a world-class African American singer whose song, at the foot …