Profile of Amiri Baraka on Famous Like Me

Amiri Baraka (born October 7, 1934) is a U.S. writer of poetry, drama, essays; and music criticism.

Life

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey. In 1952 he changed his name to LeRoi Jones. In 1967 he adopted the African name Imamu Ameer Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka. Baraka studied philosophy and religious studies at Rutgers University, Columbia University and Howard University without obtaining a degree. In 1954 he joined the US Air Force reaching the rank of sergeant. After an anonymous letter to his commanding officer accusing him of being a communist led to the discovery of Soviet writings, Baraka was put on gardening duty and given a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.

The same year he moved to Greenwich Village working initially in a warehouse for music records. From this period stems his interest in jazz. At the same time he came into contact with the incipient movement of Beat writers that was going to have a powerful influence on his early poetry. In 1958, Jones founded Totem Press, which published such Beat icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The same year he married Hettie Cohen and with her became joint editor of the Yugen literary magazine (until 1963).

Career

In 1960 Baraka went to Cuba, a visit that initiated his transformation into a politically active artist. In 1961 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note was published, followed in 1963 by Blues People: Negro Music in White America - to this day one of the most influential volumes of jazz criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning Free Jazz movement. His play Dutchman premiered in 1964 and the same year he won an Obie Award for it. After the killing of Malcolm X he broke with the Beat Poets, left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem because, at the time, he thought of himself as a "black cultural nationalist." Hettie Cohen, later, in her autobiography How I Became Hettie Jones (1996), claimed that Baraka had mistreated her during the time of their marriage.

In 1966 Baraka married his second wife who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967 he became a lecturer at San Francisco State University. In 1968 he was arrested in Newark for illegally carrying a weapon and resisting arrest during riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King and was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison; shortly afterwards an appeal court threw out the sentence. The same year his second book of jazz criticism Black Music came out, a collection of previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In 1970 he strongly supported Kenneth Gibson's candidacy for mayor of Newark; Gibson was elected the city's first Afro-American Mayor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Baraka courted controversy by penning some strongly anti-Jewish poems and articles, similar to the then stance of the Nation of Islam.

Around 1974 Baraka distanced himself from Black nationalism and became a Marxist and a supporter of anti-imperialist third world liberation movements. In 1979 he became a lecturer at SUNY for the Africana Studies Department. The same year, after altercations with his wife, he was sentenced to a short period of compulsory community service. Around this time he began writing his autobiography. In 1980 he denounced his former anti-semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-zionist. In 1984 Baraka became a full professor. In 1987, together with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, he was a speaker at the commemoration ceremony for James Baldwin. In 1989 he won an American Book Award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes Award. In 1990 he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 was a supporting actor in Warren Beatty's film Bulworth. In 2002 the state of New Jersey made him poet laureate - a position he had to give up in 2003 surrounding controversy to do with his 9/11 poem Somebody Blew Up America. Some lines of this poem were, by some, interpreted to mean that Baraka claimed the Israelis were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center (read an integral version of the poem here).

Bibliography

• Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
• Blues Peple: Negro Music in White America, 1963
• Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964
• The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965
• Home: Social Essays, 1965
• Tales, 1967
• Black Magic, poems, 1969
• Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
• In Our Terribleness, with Fundi (Billy Abernathy), poems and photography, 1970
• It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
• Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
• Hard Facts, poems, 1975
• The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
• Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
• reggae or not!, 1981
• Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
• The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
• The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
• Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
• Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
• Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
• Somebody Blew Up America, 2001

Film

• See IMDB

External Links

• Homepage of Amiri Baraka
• Modern American Poetry Page: Amiri Baraka
• Blue Neon Alley - Amiri Baraka directory
• Essay on Baraka’s leroy

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Amiri Baraka