K e v i n  P o w e l l

Kevin Powell is widely considered one of America’s most important voices in these early years of the 21^st century. Legendary feminist icon Gloria Steinem proclaimed that "as a charismatic speaker, leader, and a very good writer, Kevin Powell has the courage...to be fully human, and this will bring the deepest revolution of all." Famed scholar and social critic Dr. Michael Eric Dyson has called Powell "a mighty wind of fresh air."

Kevin Powell is an activist, poet, journalist, essayist, editor, cultural curator, hiphop historian, songwriter, music producer, public speaker, political consultant and fundraiser, and businessman. A product of extreme poverty, welfare, fatherlessness, and a single mother-led household, he is a native of Jersey City, New Jersey and was educated at New Jersey’s Rutgers University. Kevin Powell is a longtime resident of Brooklyn, New York, and it is from his base in New York City that Powell has published six books, including his current title, Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? Manhood, Race, and Power in America, which is an Essence magazine bestseller. His next project, Someday We’ll All Be Free, will hit in 2006 and will feature essays on the 2004 presidential election, September 11^th, and Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast tragedy. Powell is also at work on his childhood memoir, homeboy alone, slated for 2008. Additionally, Powell is compiling his second volume of poetry, My Own Private Ghetto, and The Kevin Powell Reader, which will highlight the first twenty years of his literary career. Indeed, he has written numerous essays, articles, and reviews over the past two decades for publications such as Newsweek, The Washington Post, Essence, Code, Rolling Stone, The Amsterdam News, and Vibe, where he was a founding staff member and served as a senior writer. It was at Vibe that Powell interviewed and profiled a number of hiphop icons including, most famously, the late Tupac Shakur on several occasions.

A gifted and highly sought after public speaker, Powell has lectured on multiculturalism, American and Black American history, the life of Dr. King, civil rights, American politics, sexism from a male perspective, leadership, social activism, and the state of hiphop, among other topics, at hundreds of colleges and universities, community centers, religious institutions, conferences, and festivals, as well as in corporate settings. Furthermore, Kevin Powell routinely offers his insights on a variety of matters, to TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, and internet outlets in America, and abroad. Powell is presently producing a series of townhall meetings across America called the State of Black Men Tour, which will visit approximately 25 cities through the end of 2006, and culminate with Black Men in America…A National Conversation, in June 2007, in New York City. And his future political plans include either a run for office in his adopted hometown of Brooklyn, New York, or the launching of a new organization.

A fixture on the pop culture landscape the past fifteen years, Powell has, among other things, hosted and produced programming for HBO and BET; written a screenplay; hosted an award-winning MTV documentary; and was the Guest Curator of the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes, and Rage”—which originated at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, and of which Powell was the exhibition consultant—the first major exhibit in America on the history of hiphop. Of late Powell has become the founder, CEO, and president of True York Entertainment, LLC, a new multimedia company with interests in marketing, film, television, and music, including representation of the talented young singer Shannone Holt.

Of paramount importance to Kevin Powell, however, is his activism. He has been a leader in some form or fashion for the past twenty years, dating back to his days at Rutgers University. He was a participant in the student-led anti-apartheid movement, the drive to end racism in South Africa; he has been at the forefront of police brutality and racial bias cases; he has worked for years around voting rights; Powell has organized a number of concerts, mc battles, rallies, and forums that stress the use of hiphop as a tool for social change; he has become a very outspoken critic of violence against women and girls; Powell has taught, mentored, and counseled in schools, camps, prisons, and on the streets of urban America; he produces an annual holiday party every December in New York City that benefits the needy; and Powell has been a central figure in Gulf Coast disaster relief efforts, facilitating the delivery of goods and services to the affected regions, and being in on long-term rebuilding plans for the region, particularly as it concerns poor people.

Of his life work Kevin Powell says, simply, "My life-calling is to be a servant for the people, period. Money, fame, status, personal achievements, and all that means very little to me when pain and  suffering are still real on this planet. I am interested in the powerless becoming powerful."

Someday We'll All Be Free
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Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Soft Skull Press (August 28, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 1933368578

"The enlightening essays in Someday We'll All Be Free are an interpretive collage of tragic events in American life that are redefining our debates about civil liberties and the unspoken expendability of the poor."
—The Washington Post

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast region of the United States in late August 2005, writer and activist Kevin Powell knew he had to do something. He personally traveled to New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Houston to interview and help survivors. He organized large truck shipments to the affected region by staging two major New York City benefits in the span of three months. He co-created Katrina on the Ground, which sent over 700 young people, mostly college students, to the devastated area as an alternative Spring Break in March 2006. And Powell wrote the bulk of his seventh book, Someday We'll All Be Free, in the midst of this national tragedy, including the third and final essay, “A Psalm for New Orleans.”

“This is the hardest book I've ever written,” Powell says, “because it was born in the midst of a great catastrophe, and in the aftermath of that catastrophe, with little time for me to deal with my own trauma, pain, and sadness around what happened in New Orleans. But I felt compelled to write because we have to document this episode in the American journey honestly, with the hope and determination that it will never happen again.”

Using the Katrina calamity as his inspiration for truth-telling, Powell decided to add a previously unpublished essay about the 2004 presidential election (“Looking for America”) and a long meditation on September 11th (“September 11th”) to Someday We'll All Be Free (the book title comes from the classic Donny Hathaway song). The result is Powell's most distinguished work to date, three literary sermons that bring to mind the raw brilliance of James Baldwin, the iconoclastic musings of Norman Mailer, and the stinging political sobriety of Joan Didion. While Someday We'll All Be Free is about specific times and specific situations in American history, these pieces transcend these times and situations and become a virtual town hall meeting on the enduring quest for freedom and democracy in America, and on this planet, in these early days of the 21st century. Indeed, these coolly observant essays-essays that tackle difficult topics like war, terrorism, poverty, the American identity, leadership, religion, patriotism, and the cooptation of hiphop-firmly establish why Powell is widely considered one of America's brightest leaders and thinkers.

Who's Gonna Take the Weight?: Manhood, Race, and Power in America
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ISBN: 0609810448
Format: Paperback, 160pp
Pub. Date: August 2003
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Edition Description: 1ST

Who's Gonna Take The Weight? features three mind-jolting essays: In "The Breakdown" Powell revisits the dark, suicidal days of his life after being fired from Vibe magazine in 1996. What begins as a critical self-reflection on what led to his personal demise expands into scorching candor as Powell tears apart the notions of integration and multiculturalism, celebrity and success, and power in America.

In "Confessions Of A Recovering Misogynist" Powell explores how manhood is constructed in this country, through the lens of his own personal saga, from his tumultuous relationship with his mother and other women, to a recognition that manhood based on domination and violence is a recipe for destruction, of women, and of men.

And in the final essay, "What Is A Man?" Powell presents a Herculean meditation on the life and times of the late Tupac Shakur, on Black fathers and Black sons (the Civil Rights generation and the hiphop generation), on Black leadership, on
the wins and losses of the Civil Rights era, and on the twisted and tragic Black male-White male relationship in America, from slavery to Eminem.

“My mission at this moment of my life journey is to rise above the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune; to vaccinate myself against that mental
terrorism germ known as self-hatred, hatred of people who look like me, and the
hatred of individuals or groups irrespective of who they are; and to be a
truth-seeker and a truth-teller, not just for Black people, but for the human race.”
 —From the Prologue

Anguished, funny, sad, honest, and full of hope and love, Who's Gonna Take The Weight? reveals both astonishing clarity of vision and an unsettling emotional immediacy. Written 100 years after W.E.B. DuBois published the historic The Souls of Black Folk and 40 years after James Baldwin penned the classic The Fire Next Time, Kevin Powell's Who's Gonna Take The Weight? bears witness to the burning issues that have accompanied us on our journey into the 21st century.

Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
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Kevin Powell, Editor

Format: Hardcover, 470pp.
ISBN: 0471380601
Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
Pub. Date: October  2000

Read more about the contributors to this fantastic volume of work

The best work of hip-hop generation writers captured in a single volume

From fiction writers, poets, journalists, and commentators, this absorbing anthology captures, for the first time, the new school of black writing, including established and award-winning authors like Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Danyel Smith, and Paul Beatty, as well as emerging voices from around the world. In addition to showing today's literary flowering, Step Into A World provides a window into the crucial issues of contemporary black life, including racial and sexual identity, post-civil rights politics, and hip-hop culture. Compiled by critically acclaimed poet, journalist, and essayist Kevin Powell, this groundbreaking book is a revelation.

Kevin Powell (Brooklyn, NY) is a critically acclaimed poet, journalist, and essayist. He is the former senior editor for Vibe, and has been published in dozens of periodicals, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, George, Essence, and One World.

"Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears, and the fearlessness. Step into a World is a kaleidoscope into the world not bound by artificial constructs like nation. John Coltrane recorded ‘Giant Steps,’ which is a riff on the sight and sounds in his muse. Powell plays the computer with equal astuteness." –Nikki Giovanni

"Those of us who pay attention were aware that the younger generation of blackwriters was being smothered by the anointment of talented tenth Divas and Divuses, and their commercial accommodationist ‘Fourth Renaissance. ’This anthology is indeed a breakthrough! It combines the boldness and daring of hip-hop with the intellectual keenness of a Michele Wallace or a Clyde Taylor." –Ishmael Reed

"In a culture where videos, the Internet, and other high-tech communication is being consumed like the latest mind-altering drug, how does great literature grow and survive? These writers will answer that all-important question. This anthology provides a clue, a hint, as to where we might be going. They are resisting all this vacant, empty-minded nothingness. Read them. Listen to them. If you don’t, you do so at your peril." –Quincy Troupe

 Keepin' It Real: Post-MTV Reflections on Race, Sex, and Politics
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Publisher:  Random House, Incorporated
Date Published:  April 1998
Format:  Trade Paper

"Here is a book to read and a writer to watch.   Obviously Kevin Powell has the talent to see and the power to say.  He truly keeps it real" ~Maya Angelou

In Keepin' It Real, writer, poet, and cultural critic Kevin Powell puts both himself and society under a microscope and creates a searingly honest collection that is both powerful and disturbing. Powell's letters and reflections take us on the dizzying tight-rope walk between two worlds. From the poverty and misery of his New Jersey childhood to the excesses and successes of his mercurial rise to prominence, it is a life lived on the cutting edge. Within this rich weave of musings, confession, and sometimes painful introspection, Powell confronts such issues as racism, black self-hatred, gender violence in the nineties, and his own anguished revelations about sex, love, and misogyny. He also explores the meaning and myths of the Million Man March and the influential and threatening presence of rap music.

In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers
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Author:  Kevin Powell, Ras Baraka (Editor)
Publisher:  Writers & Readers Publishing, Inc.
Date Published:  September 1992
Format:  Trade Paper

'In The Tradition is a provocative collection of works by some of America's most articulate young writers. Covering subjects which range from politics to love, this book crystallizes for its readers that the younger generation of Black poets and fiction writers have a serious grasp of the perils that beset their lives, their families and friends, their community-the writing is strong intelligent and mature.

Recognize: Poems
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Author:  Kevin Powell
Publisher:  Writers & Readers Publishing, Inc.
Date Published:  May 1995
Format:  Trade Paper

Driven by hip-hop music, popular culture, national and global events, and the specifics of his own life, Kevin Powell's voice is one of the boldest and brightest in the 1990's poetry renaissance. Passionate and witty, Powell's poetry is filled with fly girls and lost loves, grandmothers and absent fathers. His poetry conveys the hope, anger and fear of a generation.

Related Links

Kevin Powell Elsewhere on AALBC.com

An Interview w/ Kevin Powell on Hip Hop, Race & Politics
http://www.daveyd.com/interviewkevinpowell.html

Kevin for Congress

Step into a World

 

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