Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

The Art of Reversing Climate Change Denial (part 1 of 2)

10/12/2021

On September 20, 2021, I was still trying to decide which artwork, representative of a visual “narrative,” I should submit for the latest Savannah Art Association airport exhibit when something occurred which would force the final decision for me. It started with a single drop of rain.

For only the second or third time this year, I congratulated myself, on the date noted, for having been wise enough to use my last government stimulus check to get repairs done on my 90-year-old roof. That was something I had not been able to do after surviving the butt-kickings delivered by: Hurricane Matthew in 2016, Hurricane Irma in 2017, Hurricane Michael in 2018, and Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

Rain had been pounding the tin going on two days straight. It sounded more like a herd of mustangs racing nonstop across an open plain than a typical southeastern Georgia late-summer downpour. I felt secure enough in my reinforced shelter to start watching a movie on Netflix. Then, I heard something I was certain did not come from the streaming comic relief. I hit the mute button.

Incredibly, the distinct horrible noise of a drop of water echoed just a few inches away from the flat screen sitting atop an antique display cabinet. It was painfully more than I wanted to believe as I slowly stood, examined the polished wood beside the TV, and yelled “No!” There forming on the wood was a tiny shiny pool of terror.

I looked up and discovered on the ceiling a short thin hairline fracture through which water was squeezing. The spot was one which had not leaked previously. My stimulus check, it appeared, had allowed me to invest in an illusion of safety without providing a true solution to the problem at hand. A glass bowl to catch the drip would have to do for the time being.

Flashback to a Global Warming Warning

The water invading my personal living room space immediately reminded me of standing in the kitchen of an elderly friend’s home during Hurricane Matthew and staring horrified as the sagging ceiling while drops fell faster and faster. As described in the story “Trees Down Everywhere” (published in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah) I had convinced my friend to let me look after her century-old two-story Victorian house until the storm passed. The ceiling held, barely, and the next day I walked through Savannah’s historic district with camera in hand photographing Matthew’s blunt message to the city.

Nothing made a stronger impact on me than dozens of giant palm and oak trees fallen across the landscape. While I had once described the area’s palm trees as shaggy-headed gods, they now appeared more like victims of mass shootings. Or some senseless war.

Until that moment, the increasing ravages of global warming had only prompted me to write a poem or two expressing outrage on the Earth’s behalf, or dismay over human beings’ lack of compassion when it came to our living breathing planet. It was obvious, as I captured images of a green giant fallen next to the Confederate Monument (itself undamaged) in Forsyth Park, and others toppled lifeless across streets and downtown squares, I needed to do a lot more to counter not just the culture of climate change denial. I needed to help heal the collective blind spot which enabled too many to automatically dismiss the realities of the climate crisis as nothing more than science fiction. Or a “hoax.” They could not be wakened to acceptance until coaxed into serious reflections on the issue. My words, I reasoned, could accomplish that best when partnered with persuasive creative visual evidence.

Making an Important Connection

It was not difficult to understand how or why some segments of different populations continued to insist accountability for climate change had nothing to do with them. Why hold themselves responsible for something believed to be nonexistent in the first place? But even if it did: They assumed the most lethal possible consequences would occur in someone else’s lifetime.

Deniers had yet to make the connection between such realities as air pollution and premature births occurring in this decade, or what that could mean to someone they loved. Climate change and the throngs of migrants caught between the rocks and hard places of immigration policies worldwide was viewed, for most, from a comfortable televised distance. Fires voraciously consuming the U.S. west coast and glaciers dissolving daily appear to have nothing to do with the sustainability of their immediate existence.

Hurricane Matthew had already altered my own disposition completely but what occurred in my native region in September was not the same as what residents on the Gulf Coast and in the Northeast experienced during the rampage of Hurricane Ida. Nor was it anything like the severe drought frying California at the same time. Those distinctions, however, did not make my experience feel any less traumatic.

NEXT: The Art of Reversing Climate Change Denial Part 2

Aberjhani
Creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Contributing Poet for Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades

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Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1: The Art of Paradigm Dancing

5/1/2021

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"The Amazing Sustainable Power of the PEN" artwork by Aberjhani C2021)

INTRODUCTION: I first began looking forward to celebrating PEN International’s and American PEN’s centennial while observing their back-to-back 90th anniversaries 10 years ago. I did so with a series of articles titled Paradigm Dancing. The AXS Entertainment and previous PEN website pages which once hosted those articles are no longer accessible so it is my joyful honor to periodically republish different articles from the series in Visionary Vibes and to also create a complete page in support of PEN’s efforts on behalf of writers around the world.

Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

It was almost enough for me to simply join PEN America roughly a decade ago and, on its former site, set up a profile page without doing much else to qualify its existence. Such a page alone could allow me to relax inside the satisfaction of knowing I had remained true enough to my literary calling to place my name beside that of authors whose lives and craftsmanship had so often empowered my own.

That idea, of course, faded very quickly as I further allowed myself to acknowledge something I have long known: you do not claim rights to an honored tradition just because a few books allowed you to bring them into the world or because you managed to cough up the obligatory dues. One claims a right to such traditions very much the way runners on a winning Olympic relay team each earn the distinction of wearing an individual medal––by running his or her segment of the race.

This blog represents one account of one author running his segment of the race. Except that as the title and the quote attributed to Nobel laureate and P.E.N. Club co-founder John Galsworthy indicate, I see it more as a kind of dance than a race. (The anacronym P.E.N. once stood for “Poets, Essayists, Novelists” but now is spelled simply as PEN to indicate dedicated writers of all kinds.)

("Dancing to the Jazz of Life" art by Aberjhani with text by PEN co-founder John Galsworthy.

Galsworthy’s words represented more than a witty aphorism to serve as needless proof for his much-celebrated genius. They could also describe the determination with which he year after year fired off letter after letter, traveled, and campaigned to increase the Club’s membership and secure international support for it. After more than a decade of serving as the organization’s president, he often (according to Harold V. Marrot writing in The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy) expressed his weariness and desire to step down from the position. Yet one thing he did not tire of was promoting PEN’s principles themselves or his belief as spelled out in a May 1924 address to members of the American Center in New York:

“…What we feel today the world will feel tomorrow. In homely phrase: It is up to us to make a better world of it. We are the voices. Our Club exists to convert the wilderness we cry in to a green garden.” (J. Galsworthy)

Faced with such conviction and unwavering dedication, it becomes difficult to do nothing more than skillfully park on one’s semi-magnificent laurels. Therefore, the mission established for republishing this blog is to share in the dance of interactions between language and writers’ visions of literary possibilities, and, readers’ participation in that same relationship.

(“A Sigh Out of the Deeps” art by Aberjhani C2021. Quoted text by C.A. Dawson Scott)

Because this is described as a dance of notions, perspectives, and interpretations moving in out of days gone by and days yet to come, it will spin both forward and sideways at varying tempos. The material will include some articles previously posted elsewhere but most notably will feature entries that focus on principles and observations initially presented by John Galsworthy and Catherine A. Dawson Scott. It will also comprise takes on other authors and progressive thinkers inspired by PEN from the time of the original club’s founding in London in 1921, and that of PEN American Center in 1922, to the present.

As Galsworthy and Dawson Scott saw for themselves, conversion of “the wilderness we cry in to a green garden” takes some serious labor which can absorb entire lifetimes. It’s a good thing they and those who answered their call in the twentieth century have given the rest of us who are tilling fields in the twenty-first century a 100-year head start.

NEXT UP: 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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Moving Forward with Hope and Determination: Conversations with the World 105

1/24/2021

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“Considering Green on a Global Scale” art graphic by Aberjhani for Bright Skylark Literary Productions.

The question of how to move forward is not one which has been weighing heavily upon citizens of the United States only since the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorism attack on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. It is also one which people in communities around the world continue to contemplate deeply after a year of battling the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as mutant variants of the virus have started emerging across the globe. To date, some 417,538 people have died from the coronavirus in the United States and 2,122,872 have died globally.

As part of a collective strategy for moving forward, Americans have placed new leadership in the White House in the form of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris. Populations worldwide are also employing a strategic philosophy popularized by African-American civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson at the 1988 Democratic National Convention when he urged attendees to: “Keep hope alive... On tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive!”

Keeping Hope Alive on Social Media

Hopefulness became the theme of a popular social media post when the Filipino ABS-CBN News channel chose on the U.S.’s presidential Inauguration Day to share the quote below with more than 5 million followers on Twitter and almost 3 million on Facebook :

ABS-CBN News “Final Word Tonight” for January 20, 2021, featuring quote on hopefulness by Aberjhani.

The quote is from a poem which has become my most-frequently quoted: “Angel of Healing: for the Living, the Dying, and the Praying” (published in The River of Winged Dreams). Given the circumstances of the times, that people quote it frequently enough to make it a trending topic is not very surprising. Aside from the quote seen here, it is also the source of, among others, the well-known “Dare to love,” and “Compassion crowns the soul” references. The poem is a blend of haikus and free verse.

Screenshot of Global Trendsetting page for ABS-CBN News on Twitter January 20, 2021, “Final Word Tonight” quote on hopefulness by Aberjhani.

In addition to the quote shared on January 20, 2021, ABS-CBN News the next night presented these powerful words by presidential inauguration poet Amanda Gorman:

ABS-CBN News “Final Word Tonight” for January 21, featuring quote from presidential inauguration poet Amanda Gorman’s poem, The Hill We Climb.

Ms. Gorman’s inauguration poem, “The Hill We Climb,” is as heavy on determination as it is on hope. The two combined are what give the word resilience inspired meaning and applicable substance. That, perhaps more than anything else, is the way to continue moving forward.

Aberjhani
Co-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

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Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

4/3/2016

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“Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives.” --Aberjhani from Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays. ©Postered Poetics based on original poetry Spencerian calligraphy art by G.A. Gaskell. #NPM16 #PocketPoem

The launch of National Poetry Month, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, in April 1996, came just three years after the debut issue of the Savannah Literary Journal in 1993. In addition to 49 poems by 35 brilliant writers with regional and national reputations, the 1996 edition of the journal featured six works of fiction and three pieces of creative nonfiction.

My contribution to the journal that year was a personal essay but the title of it, Angels and Shakespeare (later published in I Made My Boy Out of Poetry), revealed the central place verse has always held in my life. So did this epigraph borrowed from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:

“For this reason Monday burns like
oil... and it howls in passing like a
wounded wheel...”

(Pablo Neruda, from Walking Around)

Both National Poetry Month and the publication of the journal (up until 2001) could be considered as invitations to readers, writers, and publishers to explore a more deeply intimate relationship with language. These invitations coaxed them as well to experience the different levels of power words can wield when endowing our lives with either newly-claimed or wholly-unexpected meaning.

The responses, now 20 years down the timeline, have mushroomed into a worldwide cultural mainstay where National Poetry Month (NPM) is concerned. In regard to the Savannah Literary Journal, published by the former Savannah Writers Workshop, it has confirmed the value of one of the city’s most prized artistic legacies.

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

But what should we say of poetry as a whole during the last two decades when life as so many once knew it shape-shifted into a spinning mass of digital signals, globalized communities unbounded by geographic borders, and astounding varieties of terror clashing head-on with determined demands for liberty?

Former Poetry Society of Georgia member Gerald Chan Sieg (1909-2005) receiving the Savannah Literary Journal Irene Tromble McAlister Literary Prize from editor Robert Keber in 1999. (photo Bright Skylark Literary Productions Collection)

That now populous demographic of humanity known as bloggers did not exist in 1996 and programmer Peter Merholz would not condense the term “weblog” to invent the word “blog” until 1999. Nevertheless, poetically-inclined bloggers during the first and second decades of this 21st century have done a great deal to ensure poetry occupies a prominent position within the global imagination and humanity’s collective ethical consciousness.

Moreover, the ever-mindful Nobel Prize Committee actually saw fit in 1996 to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." And in 2011 it bestowed that same honor upon Sweden’s Tomas Tranströmer , "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Obviously the Academy of American Poets’ commitment to recognizing, honoring, and documenting literary excellence within the work of American Poets did not begin with the establishment of NPM. That happened back in 1934 when founder Marie Bullock surveyed America’s literary landscape and came to a certain conclusion.

Despite the quietly-evolving cultural canonization at the time of such poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), and other American quill-masters of the period, it became apparent that more needed to be done to place poetry on some level of esteem comparable to what it stirred in the literary capitals—such as Paris, London, and Dublin––of Europe.

National Poetry Month more than half a century later represented a game-changing upgrade from previous efforts. Since its start, affiliated programs each successive year have helped observations to grow in scope and influence. Initiatives such as Poem in Your Pocket Day (observed this year on April 21), the Dear Poet Project, and Poem-A-Day (via email) contribute immensely to sustaining the sweet joyful howl of poetry in these new millennial times. The key words and hashtags that dominate social media every April––like #npm16, #pocketpoem, #jazzpoetry, #celebratingpoetry, and the tagged names of favorite poets––denote only one small measure of how successful the campaign has become.

Cover of Academy of American Poets Journal Vol 50 NPM16. “Greens, Biopsy 2” Digital C Print 2007 by artist Yedda Morrison.

It also did not hurt when citizens of the United States elected a lover and writer of poetry, Barack H. Obama, as their first African-American president in 2008. The following is from a 2009 essay written to commemorate both NPM and Jazz Appreciation Month:

…The birth of the Academy meant the birth of a movement designed to inspire, cultivate, and preserve the voice of American poets. And although it likely was not his intention to do so, President Barack Obama extended that movement not only by bearing the “stigma” of being an accomplished wordsmith but by inviting Elizabeth Alexander––an author of several books but of whom many had never heard until Obama spoke her name––to serve as his Inauguration Day poet.

(Aberjhani, from All that National Poetry Month Jazz)

If there is one thing populations of the world have needed, and received, from poetry for the past two decades, it has been inspiration. But not only inspiration in that classic form which reaffirms the value of faith.

Poetry in our post 9/11 era provides the kind of inspiration that defiantly raises poets’ voices against the brutalities of war, the insanities of terrorism, and the indignities of oppression in all its toxic forms. It empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.

Although the last edition (to date) of the Savannah Literary Journal was published in 2001, its legacy continues to stand as a richly inspiring one. Many of the poets, essayists, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers featured in its pages have since gone on to win national and international acclaim in various fields. These are but a few listed in no particular order: Janice Daugharty, Linda Rocheleau, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, David C. Hightower, Susan Johnson, Lily Keber, Ja A. Jahannes (1942 -2015), Errol Miller, Kathleen Thompson, Toussaint St. Negritude, Dufflyn Lammers, Anis Mojgani, and Vaughnette Goode-Walker. Again, these represent only a few.

Most would probably tell you their greatest contributions to the literary arts thus far have not been particular poems or stories or books. They have instead been the relationships cultivated with the hearts and souls who heard what they had to say and then drew from that hearing enough motivation to speak their own truths to power and pain and joy.

Despite the Cacophony

Whether through contributors to literary journals, the sustained dedicated efforts of members of the Academy of American Poets, or bloggers content just to have a platform where they could post lines at will, poetry has maintained a dynamic living breathing presence in the world.

Despite the cacophony of bombs and bullets which so often drown out the music of laughter (or possibly because of them) poetry at this point in history may very well be more commanding than any other previous time. There are many reasons to believe its potency, and its beauty, shall grow even stronger in the future.

Aberjhani
© National Poetry Month 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

2016 National Poetry Month poster featuring a florilegium with text excerpted from poems by diverse classic and contemporary poets. The poster was designed by Debbie Millman and produced by Emily Weiland. NPM16

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Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

3/9/2016

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Title graphic with image of French artist Claude Monet's 1890 painting "Champ d'avoine" (Oat Field) in background at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia. (photograph by Aberjhani)

When the doors of the Jepson Center for the Arts opened to the public in Savannah, Georgia’s, downtown Historic District on March 10, 2006, it served as one more important reminder that the city is much more than a time-capsule filled with unique Civil War memorabilia. It is also home to many creative progressive thinkers eager to see a more sensible social and political balance than those presently evident.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the most avant garde facility within the complex of the Telfair Arts Academy museums. The Center’s cultural and educational value to Savannah since its opening has been demonstrated many times over. It proved especially momentous to this author personally when the publication launch for ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love (co-created with artist Luther E. Vann) sponsored by the Friends of African-American Arts, was held there May 29, 2008.

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

The following year I returned to the center on March 22 with the intention of reporting on an exciting multi-media event taking place there. It featured a group of visual artists referred to as the Creative Force Artist Collective creating abstract paintings and sculpture while jazz saxophonist Jody Espina performed with a live band and audience members danced to the free-flowing vibes. The energy was so intense that I stopped jotting the notes I had been taking to write my story. Instead, my pen joined in with the flying paintbrushes, wailing music, and dancing souls by spontaneously writing the poem titled “Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center 3/22/09.” The following is an excerpt:

A man sitting monkey-like
on the rooftop of his brain
calculating the precision
with which sunbeams
seduce moonlight
is only as spectacular maybe
as a river passably scatting
red-wine imitations of Louis or Ella.

But a man leaning un-harnessed
over the blue-diamond cliffs
of his jazz-baptized soul
as he weaves southern adagios
and spur-of-the-moment riffs
into new millennium bebop Mozart suites
makes for a different order of musical flora:
worthy of sonic revelations painted abstract divine.

––Aberjhani (excerpt from Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center)

The complete poem was later published in The River of Winged Dreams. For me, the event that inspired it and the poem itself came to symbolize one of the ways that the Jepson Center for the Arts had come to exert a powerful regenerative influence on the city’s evolving cultural identity.

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

Flashing forward to January 2016: I took a trip to the Telfair Museum of Art and Jepson Center for the Arts to conduct some field research for my current book-in-progress. The first surprise as I walked through Telfair Square toward the Telfair was discovering that it undergoing heavy-duty maintenance and repairs. The building was surrounded by scaffolding and the museum’s iconic trademark statues were sheathed in plastic. It would seem administrators wanted the senior museum at its best in time for the younger gallery’s birthday.

The Telfair Museum (as seen from Telfair Square in Savannah) undergoing repairs and maintenance in early 2016. (photograph by Aberjhani)

Inside the Jepson, I was fully prepared for the splendor that greeted me as I viewed the Monet and American Impressionism exhibit in the Steward Galleries. Given the combination of how French artist Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) singular brilliance had defined, and transcended, an entire era in art history so powerfully that its impact was celebrated in the Southeastern United States two centuries later, breathtaking splendor was about the only thing anyone could have expected. What I had not been prepared for were two different but equally-stunning exhibits in the form of photographs by Jack Leigh and the captivating oversized collage canvases of Mickalene Thomas.

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Readers of the book The American Poet Who Went Home Again know that I had the great honor calling John David "Jack" Leigh II (1942–2004) my friend. He was one of those to whom the book was dedicated and also the subject of the essay titled Bound Moments: Jack Leigh’s Beautiful Southern Adventures. To this day, I still find myself fascinated by the story of how he evolved from a disciplined athlete into an inspired photographer:

“…That was my secret life, my night life. My real life was playing football and being an all-American kid and doing things that fulfilled the image of a young southern boy. The art aspect remained a latent dream but it did guide me to where I was going.”

– (from The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

In truth, I had forgotten that he spent time documenting the construction of the Jepson and turned the labors of its creation into printed black and white art. Jack Leigh was a master at extracting beauty from the mundane and framing the ordinary within angles that revealed the extra-ordinary. His “Building the Jepson Series” of photographs were not in an exhibit room on the day I visited but lined along the hallway walls leading to and from the second-floor elevator, where they were sure to capture the attention of anyone walking that way.

It was fitting that I should have encountered Jack here because one of our last recorded interviews had been about The Land I’m Bound To (2000), a 25-year retrospective of his work at the Telfair commemorating W.W. Norton’s publication of his book of the same title.

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The inclusion of the Mickalene Thomas at Giverny exhibition across the hall, in the Levitt and Varnedoe Gallery, from the Monet paintings in the Steward Galleries deftly demonstrated art’s capacity to transcend boundaries and connect diverse human stories. It also highlighted the artist Mickalene Thomas’s passion for honoring beauty in classic and innovative settings with stringently-applied standards and techniques.

Mounted video of artist Mickalene Thomas, whose work was on display at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia, at the same time as French artist Claude Monet’s. (photo by Aberjhani)

Few might imagine that a 21st-century African-American woman artist would find as much inspiration and motivation as Thomas apparently did during her stay at the 19th-century French artist Monet’s famous home. But they would discover, eventually, that the discourse sustained through her visual and verbal meditations on the impact of Monet’s aesthetic standards is an important one elevating both discussions on contemporary art and (some would argue) the quality of it.

Thomas’s supersized canvases of reclining Black Women in juxtaposition to her studied interpretations of Monet’s home present beauty, tradition, and intellectual daring as self-defining aesthetics in and of themselves. To walk into a gallery and suddenly view Mickalene Thomas’s depictions of Black Women in particular is a psychologically jarring experience. For African Americans in particular, a chasm of divided awareness can crack open and you find yourself inside shaded regions simultaneously celebrating triumphant legacies of the past and mourning destructions of Black Life and Beauty in the present.

The Promise

With the range of creative talents that have been able to find expression and representation at the Jepson Center for the Arts since 2006, any and all tributes in honor of that fact are fully appropriate. And yet, more exciting than what the facility’s administrators, docents, patrons, and visitors have accomplished thus far is the promise of what may yet be accomplished in the years to come.

Aberjhani
© 3/9/2015
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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<<Previous

The Art of Reversing Climate Change Denial (part 1 of 2)

Flashback to a Global Warming Warning

Making an Important Connection

Aberjhani
Creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Contributing Poet for Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1: The Art of Paradigm Dancing

Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

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

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Moving Forward with Hope and Determination: Conversations with the World 105

Keeping Hope Alive on Social Media

Aberjhani
Co-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

Contact the Author

Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Despite the Cacophony

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

The Art of Reversing Climate Change Denial (part 1 of 2)

​Flashback to a Global Warming Warning

Making an Important Connection

Aberjhani Creator of Silk-Featherbrush ArtstyleAuthor of Dreams of the Immortal City SavannahContributing Poet for Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades

Celebrating the PEN Centennial Part 1: The Art of Paradigm Dancing

​Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

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

Contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Moving Forward with Hope and Determination: Conversations with the World 105

​Keeping Hope Alive on Social Media

AberjhaniCo-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceCreator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

Contact the Author

Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Despite the Cacophony

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine​

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company​

The Evolution ofPhotographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty ​

The Promise​

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Flashback to a Global Warming Warning

Aberjhani
Creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Contributing Poet for Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades

Claiming Rights to an Honored Tradition

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

Keeping Hope Alive on Social Media

Aberjhani
Co-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise