A frank autobiography of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. This book records his life - the music, the women and the drugs. It talks about the white promotors and producers who exploited black musicians as well as the critics.

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin
"I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only." When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin's brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything--Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer's last chance to speak at length about his life and work.
The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin's career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.
Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin's life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of "Nobody Knows My Name." These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin's fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.

"From the eBook edition."

Recognized by the New York Times as one of the Best Photography Books. Immerse yourself in the visual stream created over the first 50 years by Kamoinge, a pioneering photographic collective founded in 1963 in New York City, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Kamoinge's members include many of the nation's most accomplished photographers. This is the first comprehensive book of the work of Kamoinge's 30 members, from the founding of the Kamoinge Workshop in 1963 to 2014. After more than 5 decades of racist barriers to the recognition of Kamoinge by major museums, the Kamoinge Workshop is finally being celebrated by the art world and has assumed its rightful place as a major force in the history of American photography, as the longest standing photographic collective. The major traveling exhibition Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop launched in 2020 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Several Kamoinge original members were featured in the major 2017-2020 international exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, first created at the Tate Modern in London then traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Broad Museum, the de Young Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In this stunning compendium, over 280 photographs are interspersed with insights and thoughts from Kamoinge's members and other renowned authors. Taken in New York City, West Africa, Guyana, and suburban America, the photos include abstracts; daily moments of men, women and children; landscapes; and portraits of Miles Davis, Biggie Smalls, a young Ntozake Shange, and many other visionary citizens. Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge was recognized by the New York Times as one of the Best Photography Books of 2015.

Kyle Dargan's debut collection of poetry, "The Listening," searches through the cluttered surface of contemporary life to tune into the elemental sounds within the marrow of living/life. Throughout the collection, Dargan interweaves elements of his heritage with the present day--jazz influences blend with hip-hop; neoslave narratives run parallel with the intimate tale of civil rights leaders; post-9/11 America is juxtaposed with family portraits of the sixties and seventies--to reveal the continuous, though ever changing, music of the world around us. Whether capturing the famous Ali-Frazier fight in Manila or a trip to the local barbershop, Muddy Waters or boyhood blacktop games, Dargan gives voice to the most poignant and fleeting aspects of our everyday existence. With singular incisiveness and vigor, these poems act simultaneously as psalms and elegies, praising life at the same time they lament its inevitable passing.

The world is made of seductions. In Quincy Troupe's Seduction, the ""I"" becomes the ""Eye,"" serving as metaphor and witness in a narrative compilation from a master of poetic music. Elegies and dramatic odes look at the seduction of all things loved or hated, especially the man made of color. How did the killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin seduce the public's eye and catch the fire of racism? How did Aretha Franklin seduce us with voice and twang? How does the art of Romare Bearden or Jack Whitten still tell our truths, fantasies, and oppressions? time is a bald eagle, a killer soaring high in the blue, / music to men dodging bullets in speeding cars, / knew death, hoped it'd never come . . . In this collection we are seduced by Troupe's opus. This is the poet's art laid bare. He is our ""Eye."" Visions of the transatlantic slave trade, portraits of American violence, pop culture, and historical voices are the lyrical relics in Troupe's masterful verse. One of American literature's most important rhythmical artists, Troupe has created a chronicle reaching through history for the collective ""I/Eye"" that is all of us.

If we were all brave enough to resurrect the voices lost from our humanity, what would they say? Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe, spokesman for the humanizing forces of poetry, music, and art, parts the Atlantic and rattles the ground built on slavery with Ghost Voices: A Poem in Prayer. we are crossing, / we are / crossing, / we are crossing in big salt water, // we are crossing, // crossing under a sky of no guilt / we have left home // though we know we will go back / someday, / see our people / as we knew them . . . Troupe re-creates the history of lost voices between the waters of Africa, Cuba, and the United States. His daring poetics drenched in new forms-notably the seven-elevens-clench transformative narratives spurred on by a relentless, rhythmic language that mimics the foaming waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. His personae speak quantum litanies within one epic, sermonic-gospel to articulate our most ancient ways of storytelling and survival.