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Unit Six Assignment (Black Women's Rhetoric Project): Part One
The document introduces six influential Black female poets and writers from the Black Arts Movement: Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Ntozake Shange, and Carolyn Rodgers. Students are instructed to choose one of these women to focus on for a writing assignment by reviewing playlist videos about them and the Black Arts Movement.
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Unit Six Assignment (Black Women's Rhetoric Project): Part One
- 1. The Black Women’sRhetoric Project http://blackwomenrhetproject.org Unit Six Go through the playlist videos From the Black of the six female poets and Arts Movement to writers listed here who Spoken Word emerge during the Black Artists Arts Movement. Part I of Your Choose one woman who you will focus on for your Assignment writing.
- 2. What is theBlack Arts Movement? “The Black Arts movement was the only American Black women during BAM wrote literary movement to both within the movement AND against it. Taken advance "social together,BAM women set engagement" as a sine qua the stage for the black non of its aesthetic… and women’s literary boom dashed forward toward an that followed (including alternative that initially works of Alice Walker, Toni seemed unthinkable and Morrison, Ruby Dee,Maya Angelou) and the political unobtainable: Black Power.” terrain for the new wave of ~ Kalumaya Salaam Black Feminism.
- 3. Sonia Sanchez Born in 1934…. Poet. Mother. Professor. National and International lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women’s Liberation, Peace and Racial Justice. Sonia Sanchez is the author of over 16 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Love Poems, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?,Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Shake Loose My Skin, and most recently, Morning Haiku. http://soniasanchez.net/
- 4. Sonia Sanchez “And I cried… for all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization, and finding ruins…”
- 5. Nikki Giovanni Born1943… Nikki Giovanni is a world-renowned poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the most widely-read American poets, she prides herself on being "a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English." Giovanni remains as determined and committed as ever to the fight for civil rights and equality. Always insisting on presenting the truth as she sees it, she has maintained a prominent place as a strong voice of the Black community. Her focus is on the individual, specifically, on the power one has to make a difference in oneself, and thus, in the lives of others. http://nikki-giovanni.com/
- 6. Nikki Giovanni “We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.”
- 7. Gwendolyn Brooks Sunrise 1917 Sunset 2000 Brooks' first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville(1945), published by Harper and Row, earned instant critical acclaim. With her second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1950), she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Brooks will be an icon for us in the Black Arts Movement because of her essential role in funding, mentoring, and supporting many BAM artists and their work in numerous ways.
- 8. Gwendolyn Brooks “What I'mfighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.”
- 9. Jayne Cortez Sunrise 1934 Sunset 2012 Cortez gave her first public poetry readings with the Watts Repertory Theater Company, a Los Angeles ensemble she founded in 1964, when she began performing her work to musical accompaniment. For the past three decades she toured and recorded with her own band, The Firespitters. Meant for the ear even more than for the eye, her poetry was known for its combination of written verse, African and African- American oral traditions, political protest, and jazz and blues. http://www.jaynecortez08.com/
- 10. Jayne Cortez Invoking Duke Ellington’s 1956 “A Drum Is a Woman,” Cortez writes “If the Drum Is a Woman,” one of her best-known works, to indict violence against women: “why are you pounding your drum into an insane babble why are you pistol-whipping your drum at dawn why are you shooting through the head of your drum and making a drum tragedy of drums if the drum is a woman don’t abuse your drum …”
- 11. NtozakeShange Born 1948 Shange is a playwright, poet, and black feminist, best known the Obie Award-winning play and choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She has also written numerous works of fiction, including Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, Betsy Brown, and Liliane.
- 12. NtozakeShange “ifound god inmyself &i loved her / i loved her fiercely.”
- 13. Carolyn Rodgers Sunrise 1940 Sunset 2010 A student of Gwendolyn Brooks, Rodgers was a leading BAM poet. Her collections of poetry include Paper Soul (1968), Songs of a Blackbird (1969), which won the Poet Laureate Award of the Society of Midland Authors,how I got ovah: New and Selected Poems (1975), The Heart as Ever Green: Poems (1978), and Morning Glory: Poems (1989).
- 14. Carolyn Rodgers “Ithink sometimes wheniwrite God has his hand on me i am his little black slim ink pen.”
- 15. The Black Women’sRhetoric Project http://blackwomenrhetproject.org Unit Six Go through the playlist videos From the Black of the six female poets and Arts Movement to writers listed here who Spoken Word emerge during the Black Artists Arts Movement. Part I of Your Choose one woman who you will focus on for your Assignment writing.