Issue 19 Contributors | Mosaic Literary Magazine

ISSUE NINETEEN

TRIBUTE ISSUE TO GWENDOLYN BROOKS
As we celebrate the 90th anniversary of the birth of Gwendolyn Brooks the nineteenth issue of Mosaic pays tribute through poetry, essays, and recollections on the first African American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

S. Brandi Barnes is a Chicago poet, journalist, and book reviewer. She is a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks’ Significant Poet Award; is an alumni of Second City Improv Theatre, author of BlackBerries in the ChinaCabinet, and is the current director of the OBAC-WW (Organization of Black American Culture) Writers Workshop.

Tara Betts is adjunct lecturer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

Stacia L. Brown is a freelance writer and editor residing in New York. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Christian Campbell, of The Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago, is a poet, scholar, journalist and culture worker. His work has been widely published in journals and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently Sable, Poetry London, Small Axe, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia), New Caribbean Poetry (Carcanet) and New Poetries IV (Carcanet). His poem, “A Federation of Wings,” was recently nominated for the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem published in Britain in 2006.

Ozioma Egwuonwu is a Brooklyn based freelance writer. She is the founder of Burn Bright Lifeworks, Inc. a creative-life consulting company that specializes in business, creative and personal development.

DuEwa M. Frazier is a poet, writer and editor of Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees (Lit Noire Publishing). She resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Danielle A. Jackson is a corporate analyst and freelance writer. She resides in northern New Jersey.

Poems by Joy Gonsalves have recently appeared in The Independent, Crab Orchard Review, and Verse. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is currently a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Kentucky.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of They Shall Run--Harriet Tubman Poems (Third World Press, April 2004). He is the recipient of the 2000 Poet of the Year Award, presented by Chicago’s Black Book Fair; the 1999 Henry Blakely Award, presented by Gwendolyn Brooks; and the 1999 Wallace W. Douglas Distinguished Service Award, presented by Young Chicago Authors, Inc.

Haki R. Madhubuti is a poet and founder and publisher of Third World Press. He is also University Distinguished Professor and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing At Chicago State University. His most recent books are Run Toward Fear: New Poems and a Poet’s Handbook and Yellow Black: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life, A Memoir.

Editor and poet Gwendolyn Ann Mitchell manages one of the leading independent African-American publishers in the nation, Third World Press. Mitchell is also the author of Veins and Rivers, and a book length poem, Ain’t I Black. She has co-edited two anthologies of creative writing.

Kalamu ya Salaam is the founder/director of NOMMO Literary Society, an African American writing workshop. He also operates the arts listserv “E-DRUM.” Email kalamu@aol.com to join.

Asali Solomon was born and raised in West Philadelphia. Her first book, a collection of stories entitled Get Down, was released October 2006. Solomon’s work has been featured in Vibe, Essence, and the anthology Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips and Other Parts. She received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for the stories in Get Down. Though she has a Ph.D. in English and an MFA in creative writing and teaches at Washington and Lee University, she is still not sure whether to call Maud Martha a novel or a novella.

Kim Rose is a writer, literary publicist and native of Rochester, NY.

Nagueyalti Warren is a poet from Atlanta, Georgia, a member of the Baobab Poetry Collective and a Cave Canem Fellow (2003-2006). Her poems have appeared in Essence Magazine, The Ringing Ear, Gathering Ground, and The African American Review.

Afaa Michael Weaver’s tenth collection of poetry The Plum Flower Dance/ poems 1985 to 2005, will be published in November by University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College.

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