Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Seeker with the Inkhorn Number 1: Notes on Compassion in the Summer of a Life

7/8/2021

"Seeker with the Inkhorn" title art graphic by Aberjhani.

A couple of years before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, I published on the Charter for Compassion website a blog series titled Notes on Compassion in the Summer of a Life Infused with Democratic Vistas and Creative Resistance. A long title, yes, but also an accurate one. It was an extended reflection on the state of our world as one writer approached a milestone birthday.

With the USA economy cautiously reopening even as worldwide deaths from coronavirus surpass 4 million, it is worth reposting a shorter version of one series installment titled “Seeker with the Inkhorn.” Why? Because our species learns some things, like the priceless value of peace or love, more slowly than others. Consider reports this first week of July 2021 regarding the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise. Think about the controversies over whether to get vaccinated against COVID or not, and the painful necessity of pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.

The need for a collective commitment to coexistence has never been greater and yet somehow remains stubbornly elusive. Therefore, what follows is about making the best use of what life continues to teach us as we struggle to move forward with greater knowledge, wisdom, and hopefully, reinforced resilience.

Identifying Our Best Options

When studying activities of human advancement as they take shape throughout history, we find a lot of attention given to the areas of military domination, economic schemes, scientific discoveries, political showmanship, and emerging patterns of social interaction.

The cultural arts, spiritual concerns, and developments in education often appear to be acknowledged less frequently. They are usually somewhere in the background of officially-recorded history functioning like unseen digital code that drives more ostensible programming. Individual lives can also be that way. They/we get lost or displaced in the dynamically-charged cross-currents of opposing priorities and agendas.

As a species, human beings may not be able to collectively shift from one history-shaping mindset to another in a single instant. But we can, collectively, take time to identify our best options for a sustainable shared future––be they ethical, political, economic, spiritual, or educational in nature––and make them our common goals.

Seeker with the Inkhorn

In the course of composing one life story, my individual character has gone from that of impoverished youth and scuffling student to military veteran, family man, bookseller, caregiver, author, social justice advocate, and artist. Each transformation required exchanges of compassion wherein I was both a recipient and a contributor.

Once, when living in San Francisco, after an emergency situation left me short of funds to pay rent for my downtown studio apartment, an older Black man gave me a lesson in practicing and extending compassion without attempting to compromise my physical or psychological well-being in any way. He insisted on giving me the capital needed and asked that I do one thing in return: “Don’t pay me back no money. The next time somebody come to you for help, just give them whatever you can the same as I did for you. Understand?”

I did. And when possible, I have.

Bright Skylark LP quotation art with image of Author-Poet-Artist Aberjhani holding book of history on African Americans. C2021)

Later still, as an equal opportunity enforcement counselor for the U.S. Air Force Reserves, I saw up-close-and-personal the way private traumas centered around issues like spouse abuse and alcoholism damage people’s lives. And I saw also how we sometimes so effectively shield ourselves with masks of pretense that we fail daily to recognize the life-preserving need to study and practice that simple, yet so powerful, practice I was taught in San Francisco: the art of compassion.

At the core of all my functional personas has been the seeker with the inkhorn constantly transcribing autobiography into diverse forms of literature and journalism. However, that fundamental anchor at times has also undergone the kind of scrutiny which prompted biographer Annie Cohen-Solal to note the following about Jean-Paul Sartre during a powerful transformational period in his life:

“The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.” (Cohen-Solal, Sartre, A Life, 2005 Centennial Edition, p. 359.)

Put less dramatically, the statement means acting beyond the need to express individual creative artistry with a conscious intent to render tangible humanitarian service. Some of our best creative thinkers manage, when possible, to combine the two.

NEXT: Seeker with the Inkhorn Number 2: Compassionate Comic Relief

Aberjhani
Co-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Original Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

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Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street Race Riot

5/16/2021

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While the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, which the late Dr. Clement Alexander Price referred to as “that most brilliantly lit terrain,” has been rightly celebrated as the focal point of the Harlem Renaissance, there were a number of other communities where African Africans managed to thrive during the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s. One such community was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and May/June 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of its racially-motivated destruction.

This commemoration is in honor of those Black strivers whose lives and homes were demolished by hate but whose legacy still inspires.

Revelation of a Tragedy

What is now described as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 is something I knew nothing about until I began conducting research on an article about Tulsa for Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. In the course of that research, I was fortunate to connect and correspond with one Dr. Gregory E. Brown. At the time, Dr. Brown was director of an organization called the Black Holocaust Society and described himself as “The Angry Black Man.” He made me aware of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded in 1984 by lynching survivor Dr. James Cameron.

He also pointed me towards a cache of images in the public domain which had been culled from “movie reels in the National Archives” and other photographs previously collected by Bob Hower, author of Angels of Mercy (a book on the Red Cross’s response to the riots).

Visiting Dr. Brown’s Black Holocaust Society website while working on the encyclopedia in 2002, I was stunned to read this statement: “Between 1824 and 1951 there were over 300 events classified as ‘White Race Riots’ in which entire white communities turned on Black Americans and destroyed entire Black communities and murdered Blacks in mass. There were 26 such major events in major cities across the US during the summer of 1919 alone. This period has been tagged by historians as ‘The Red Summer of 1919’ because the events all happened from May to October of that year and the blood of their victims literally painted the streets of America.”

No less stunning were the images he sent me of charred bodies, bombed buildings, and Black people standing or sitting outside as they wondered what to do next. How could something so monumental have been omitted from the classes on American history I had taken in high school and college?

That I had been selected to co-author (with Sandra L. West) Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, and the article on Tulsa fallen into a section for which I was responsible, made me feel obligated to make sure the massacre could never be forgotten again. This is a short excerpt on what made the community so exceptional:

“Prior to the massive waves of African Americans exiting the South to head North, many had been lured to the state of Oklahoma as early as the end of the 19th century in hopes of cashing in on its growing oil industry. By 1921, the state could boast the distinction of having more than two dozen towns populated and governed by blacks. Within Tulsa, approximately 15,000 African Americans made up the city’s district of Greenwood. Forced by segregation to rely upon their own means and resources, the citizens of the community became so successful that the district became known as ‘Black Wall Street.’

“Despite the active presence of the Ku Klux Klan, frequent lynchings and regular ‘whipping parties’ during which Blacks were assaulted for sport, Greenwood maintained 600 businesses, a post office, a hospital, 21 restaurants, a library, a line of buses, a bank, two movie theaters, 21 churches and 30 grocery stores. Jazz and other forms of African American music was a strong part of the community’s culture…” (Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Facts on File/Infobase Publishing)

An Expanding Black Wall Street Film Archive

Since the publication of the first edition of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance in 2003, a number of important completed and projected film projects have helped raise awareness about the destruction of Black Wall Street. Among the most acclaimed is the HBO TV mini-series The Watchmen (2019), for which actress/director Regina King won a 2018 Emmy Award.

Other film projects ensuring the massacre and its consequences are never forgotten are: Resurrecting Black Wall Street (2015), Greenwood: 13 Hours (2017 short film), Black Wall Street Burning (2020), Dreamland: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street (documentary announced in 2020), and Black Wall Street: An American Nightmare (2021).

A thorough documentation of the 1921 Tulsa riots is only one benefit of the media now devoted to them. Another is the opportunity they provide to study how and why residents of an American city reached such an explosive deadly boiling point. Much of it, we know, had to do with both fear and envy of the economic progress which African Americans were making in Tulsa at the time.

It matters because even though we cannot, in 2021, point to the destruction of a single community of African Americans spanning blocks within a specific US city, the world has borne witness repeatedly to African Americans killed by White police officers in situations which did not have to end with their deaths. Similar hate-fueled incidents have happened in regard to Latinos/Latinxs and Asian Americans as America transitions from a country dominated by a White population to one with a larger population of diverse “minority” groups. The change, clearly, is not one to which many Whites have been adjusting calmly.

Just as the social customs and official laws of the Jim Crow segregation era contributed to the violence of The Red Summer of 1919 and the Black Wall Street massacre two years later, so have various legislative policies and racial biases contributed to the violent deaths of African Americans over the past two decades. Bearing that in mind, it may be that this 100th anniversary of Tulsa’s deadly riot should commemorate something more than the pain and horror of what occurred. Maybe it could serve as a renewed commitment to making good on America’s promise to provide equal opportunities for all its increasingly-diverse citizens. It might also help us to remember, during this time when wars and rumors of wars once again dominate news headlines, we can gain a lot more striving for harmonious coexistence than we can by giving in to hate-filled rage and fear-driven ignorance.

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

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Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 3: Change in Action

5/10/2021

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Introduction

This third installment of Bright Skylark Literary Productions’ observation of the PEN International and PEN America Centennial is a condensed version of an article previously published by AXS Entertainment. It addresses the arrest of Ethiopian journalist and publisher Eskinder Nega, the history of PEN’s stance against racism, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

From Journalist to Founder of Political Party

Since the 1990s, Eskinder Nega has been arrested at least a dozen times on charges generally denounced by the world community as false. They have ranged from inciting riots and attempts to overthrow the government to participation in a murder. He and his wife, journalist Serkalem Fasil, were both jailed on charges of treason charges for their writings on government suppression of protests questioning the validity of parliamentary elections.

After his arrest in 2012 for editorials criticizing government policies and supporting the rights of citizens to protest them, PEN joined with Amnesty International and other organizations to advocate on Nega’s behalf. He was awarded the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award on May 1, 2012. He received the International Press Institute (IPI)’s 69th World Press Freedom Hero award on May 18, 2017.

Nega has modeled his style of advocacy and activism on the example of Nelson Mandela and once said, “Like my hero Nelson Mandela, my soul is unconquered, my spirit unbroken, my head unbowed, and my heart unafraid.” True to Mandela’s model of political activism and persistence, he served nearly seven years at Kaliti Prison in Addis Ababa. In addition, he experienced subsequent arrests and assaults before going on to establish the Balderas for Genuine Democracy Party in January 2020.

Nega once offered the following critique of his government and citizens of Ethiopia: “This being Ethiopia, though, leaders seldom enjoy the privilege of honest advice from subordinates... By the power tradition, leaders are told what they want to hear and not what they should… The rule in this world is simple: Thrive with opportunism and sophistry. Perish with honesty and integrity.” His growing popularity may be an indication he has found a functional balance between the divisive extremes.

The One Constant

As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count. A lasting shining example of positive change in action is PEN America itself.

Front cover of book "Mrs SAPPHO The Life of C.A. Dawson Scott 'Mother of International P.E.N." by Marjorie Watts.

In her biography of PEN co-founder Catherine A. Dawson Scott, Marjorie Watts (her daughter) observed that both Dawson Scott and PEN president John Galsworthy had a “dislike” of “racial prejudice.” Yet the PEN American Center in 1943 was all of two decades old when Harlem Renaissance authors Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps exchanged letters about the absence of any African-Americans in the organization. Responding to query from Hughes, Bontemps wrote on September 24, 1943:

“…You are right. No Negroes are members. I know of two attempts. It was rumored in Chicago that Dick (Richard Wright) was suggested for membership in N.Y. shortly after Native Son became a best seller but something came up and the idea was dropped.”

Still, three years later Wright was a guest at PEN centers throughout Europe. Ten years after that, Ralph Ellison, esteemed author of Invisible Man, was invited to join the American Center. And the rest, as “they say,” is now an unparalleled portrait of triumphant diversity.

However, the more important point in 2021 is that because it chose to embrace change for the betterment of all humanity at a time when many opted to resist it, PEN America can now celebrate 100 years as part of the world’s oldest human rights and literary advocacy organization. In other words, someone had to embrace positive beginnings before anyone could celebrate successful conclusions or continuations.

The Challenge of Making Change Work

wo of the most interesting comments regarding the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2012 came from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. himself when he stated: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” And: “…it is not our role to forbid it or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness."

Some commentators have extended interpretations of those statements, plus additional comments, as Chief Justice Roberts’ way of saying his job in this ruling “was to find a way to make the Affordable Care Act work.” How unprecedented and extraordinary is that? (Since the historic ruling, former US President Donald Trump initiated policies aimed at restricting access to the program but current President Joe Biden, upon his election, reversed Trump’s actions and expanded access.)

It is fully possible that the Affordable Care Act (popularly referred to as “Obamacare” after former U.S. President Barack H. Obama) and the movement toward humane applications of immigration laws are the beginnings of a potentially golden age for democracy. It is also possible that Eskinder Nega and the other journalists calling for greater freedom of expression in Ethiopia are heroes whose courage eventually will help elevate even more than concepts of freedom in their homeland. First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement.

To read Part 1 of this series please check out: Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1 The Art of Paradigm Dancing
You can read Part 2 of this series here: Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2 The Pattern of Dynamics

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

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Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

5/1/2021

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(“Falling in Love with Freedom All Over Again” artwork by Aberjhani ©)

INTRO: This installment of Celebrating the PEN Centennial was first published in May 2012. What it addresses in regard to writers’ relationships with language as well as such issues as immigration and genocide are as irrefutably relevant now as then. Possibly even more so. To read part 1 of this series please click here. Part 2 begins now:

Intoxicaing Melodies

Whether language is shyly uttered, fiercely written, or fearfully thought, it creates an inherent rhythm which invites the soul to dance to such intoxicating melodies as truth, anger, inspiration, fear, and love.

Human beings most often accept that invitation to dance in many different ways. Sometimes we do so by following the lead of an initial small or large realization until it whirls voluptuously into an unyielding idea that persuades us to take a certain action or cautions us against another.

Sometimes other pronouncements, spoken or un-, follow the first. But in languages of different kinds. They spring back and forth between diverse grammars and revelations of universal symbols or archetypes, as strangely enthralling formulations and poetic constructions creating what many might recognize as: a song of some kind.

The music is not always beautiful and the dance it inspires may appear more macabre than graceful. As much as we might prefer to choreograph our lives to hip-hop ballads of genuine democracy, various populations throughout the world community endure their existence instead to the soundtrack of something closer to a nonfiction nightmare dystopia.

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals. In the United States, Latinos once secure in their identities as Americans discover they are in fact something referred to as “illegal aliens.” They then have to make their way south across the Mexican border and reestablish their lives to the tune of conditions and customs which previously had been little more than the subject of tales shared by grandparents and other interesting relatives.

Leaving Somalia, refugees struggle to reach neighboring countries like Kenya and Ethiopia or, increasingly, to cross the Atlantic to the United States to escape rape, mutilation, and genocide. People indigenously at home in rain forests and other native locales find themselves driven out by the encroaching demands of commercialism [and climate change].

In each of these scenarios human beings have to adapt to choices made by someone other than themselves and dance frantically, as it were, to a beat not their own. The forced nature of these cultural migrations burden language with a vocabulary of tears steeped in grief and desperation. And they challenge writers to retrieve out of these everyday tragedies any beauty worth singing–– without glamorizing the horrors involved or betraying the lives so despicably at risk.

The Pattern of Dynamics

An author accepting language’s invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his or her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively––even if with much dread––in ways which synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge. Subtle energies crackle insistently along intersecting horizontal and vertical lines to occupy each other repeatedly and compose a vision which at some point may be called a story, a poem, an essay, or a play.

The pattern of dynamics might alter where different authors are concerned but the nature of this paradigm dancing remains essentially the same. Such is the culture, if you will, of the dance shared between vernacular and writers that others––passionate readers, curious friends, fellow authors, tribes on the run––are always encouraged to join them. Many, in fact, will say the dance is not a true one until they do.

NEXT UP: Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

Aberjhani
Author of The River of Winged Dreams
and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

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A Hidden American Treasure Comes to Revelatory Light (part 3 of 3): Sweating out a Poem

9/16/2019

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Title art-graphic with Suzanne Jackson, Rachel Reese, and Alonzo Davis on stage at Telfair Museums Jepson Center for the Arts. The screen above them is showing archival images from the Suzanne Jackson Five Decades art exhibit. (photo by Aberjhani for Bright Skylark Literary Productions)

Having refrained for years from attending any kind of party at all, I relaxed my self-imposed tension by mixing in a little work with a lot of fun. In a room next to the kitchen (which itself resembled an art installation) I saw a stack of books and, being the bookaholic I am, could not resist their pull.

Picture my surprise when discovering in the pages of Daniel Widener's Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (2010), and Kellie Jones's South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), extensive references to the woman of the hour. Also nearby was a copy of ELEMENTAL and seeing it made me feel like the spirit of our friend Luther had dropped in to support the launch with his blessings.

By the time of the party, I had already learned that as well as being a visual artist, Suzanne was a poet who had studied with the phenomenal Lucille Clifton (1936-2010). At least two volumes featuring poems by her had been published: What I Love: Paintings, Poetry, & a Drawing (1972), and Animals (1978). Her writing had also been included in notable anthologies like the Nikky Finney-edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007). Maybe I was hoping to find those among the stacked books as well but, to avoid becoming self-absorbed to a point of rudeness, I forced myself to step away and began taking photographs of Suzanne, different guests, and the lush greenery outside the house.

The symbolic images seen in Suzanne Jackson's 12-foot award-winning canvas "Passages" (1978, above) are described in the FIVE DECADES exhibition catalog as "associated with love, childbirth, and women painted in expressive acrylic layers." It hangs here in front of 1 of 7 display vitrines and next to other compelling works included in the Five Decades retrospective debut at the Telfair Museums Jepson Center for the Arts. (Bright Skylark Literary Productions photograph by Aberjhani ©2019)

I tried to avoid cameras myself, not because I felt shy but because for some unknown reason I had begun to sweat--not daintily "perspire" but ferociously SWEAT, like somebody fully-clothed in a sauna--and my shirt was getting soaked. No one else appeared to be having this problem. Reluctantly, when informed that Suzanne wanted an assistant to take a black-and-white photo of me for potential use in a publication, I consented. Soon afterwards, the sweating became too ridiculous and I couldn't figure out why so I said my good-byes and started walking toward my residence, located at the time on the other side of town.

About halfway there, an energized psychic push-and-pull began stirring in my skull and words started to assemble themselves in flashes and clusters. Phrases such as "painted star-fire" and "unmapped territories" swirled and glowed like special effects in a movie. Is this, I wondered, what all the heat which had started flowing through me at the party and forced me to leave before I was ready was all about? A ball of winged language was preparing to reveal itself in one form or another and left me no choice but to stop walking, grab from my shoulder bag a pen and piece of paper, and write the fragments down.

Cover of Suzanne Jackson Five Decades retrospective catalog. For information on closing tour of the retrospective and book signing with artist Suzanne Jackson click the image. (Cover art courtesy of Telfair Books)

Such experiences were not new to me but the way they sometimes manifested could still come as an unsettling disruption. This was such an instant and every other block I had to stop walking and start scribbling. By the time I got home, I had written a rough draft which looked like it could be the beginnings of a poem. Okay, I thought, I'll just leave it in this folder and go back to it next week sometime.

Except that it refused to wait.

Polychromatic Inked Pages

Over the next few days I kept feeling drawn back to the folder and added to the lines already written in black ink, more lines composed in green, red, and purple ink. Sometimes I wondered: was I writing a poem or painting one?

Eventually, the evolving draft was complete enough to take on the title Syllables Painted on a Suzannian Canvas. It was enough to type up and print a second, then later third and fourth drafts before finally settling on: Suzannian Algorithm Finger-Painted on an Abstract Wall. It fit, I thought, the words which had sweated themselves out, the polychromatic inked pages, and the artist in whose honor the work had been composed.

Table of contents from Suzanne Jackson Five Decades retrospective art exhibition catalog. In addition to artist Jackson and editor Rachel Reese, catalog contributors include: Betye Saar, Aberjhani, Melanee C. Harvey, julia elizabeth neal, & Tiffany E. Barber. (Page image courtesy of Telfair Books)

My hope to come up with an idea for an essay or poem for the planned catalog in a couple of months appeared instead to have become an accomplished mission in a few weeks. It seemed the poem, which in time would be accepted for the pages of the catalog, had started writing itself the moment I read the words HATE HAS NO HOME HERE on the sign in Suzanne's window. Or it may have started long before then, upon that first meeting during my 2004 Harlem Renaissance lecture and book signing at the Carnegie Branch Library.

Contemplating how the poem had unveiled itself, I considered it a direct response to the dynamic creative presences gathered that day in Suzanne's home, and to my observances of the current Harlem Renaissance Centennial. This was appropriate enough given the way Harlem Renaissance artists, musicians, writers, educators, and leaders often inspired and empowered each other's creative efforts and political agendas.

Countering Toxic Bigotries & Heinous Practices

The unprecedented advancements of the Harlem Renaissance on multiple cultural fronts helped counter the toxic bigotries and heinous practices of a time when many Americans, if not most, were still entrenched in unyielding mindsets forged during the death-throes of slavery as it was practiced in the 19th century. They remained so even as social, legislative, and technological progressions in the 20th century indicated those who insisted on holding onto delusions of white supremacy were doomed to agonizing personal and collective implosions.

Our present 21st-century hour bears a lot of similarities to the previous time-frame. Works by black artists supportive of progressive change mattered then as they do now because often found within them were/are important ingredients for remedies to what ails our bleeding and burning world the most. Ingredients like symbols of life-sustaining values and language encouraging actions motivated by compassion and mindfulness.

The recognition and celebration of Suzanne Jackson's achievements in this modern era when chaos and enmity command so much attention on a daily basis is a recognition and celebration of some of our better options for moving toward the next century. Her painted, poemized, and otherwise choreographed meditations offer us touchstones of remembrance and awareness. Those touchstones inspire individuals and communities to consider more deeply and more efficiently the choices which have brought humanity to this 2019 moment of quivering uncertainties, and, the options most likely to help us regain the advantages of higher ground and hopes now seemingly lost.

Aberjhani
author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

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Seeker with the Inkhorn Number 1: Notes on Compassion in the Summer of a Life

Identifying Our Best Options

Seeker with the Inkhorn

Aberjhani
Co-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Original Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street Race Riot

Revelation of a Tragedy

An Expanding Black Wall Street Film Archive

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact the Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 3: Change in Action

Introduction

From Journalist to Founder of Political Party

The One Constant

The Challenge of Making Change Work

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact the Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

Intoxicaing Melodies

The Pattern of Dynamics

Aberjhani
Author of The River of Winged Dreams
and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

A Hidden American Treasure Comes to Revelatory Light (part 3 of 3): Sweating out a Poem

Polychromatic Inked Pages

Countering Toxic Bigotries & Heinous Practices

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Seeker with the Inkhorn Number 1: Notes on Compassion in the Summer of a Life

Identifying Our Best Options

​Seeker with the Inkhorn

AberjhaniCo-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceAuthor of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My MindCreator of Original Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street Race Riot

​Revelation of a Tragedy

​An Expanding Black Wall Street Film Archive

AberjhaniCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceAuthor of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact the Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 3: Change in Action

​Introduction

From Journalist to Founder of Political Party

​The One Constant

The Challenge of Making Change Work

AberjhaniCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceAuthor of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact the Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 2: The Pattern of Dynamics

Intoxicaing Melodies

The Pattern of Dynamics

AberjhaniAuthor of The River of Winged Dreamsand Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

A Hidden American Treasure Comes to Revelatory Light (part 3 of 3): Sweating out a Poem

Polychromatic Inked Pages

Countering Toxic Bigotries & Heinous Practices

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Seeker with the Inkhorn

Aberjhani
Co-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Original Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Revelation of a Tragedy

An Expanding Black Wall Street Film Archive

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Introduction

The One Constant

Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Aberjhani
Author of The River of Winged Dreams
and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind