Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman

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"I have yet to kill anyone -- I have exhibited great restraint." —Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman was born in 1946 and is the author of Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998), winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. A former medical secretary, magazine editor, journalist and scriptwriter, Coleman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation for her poetry. –poets.org

Coleman was also a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome.

Photo: Lynda Koolish, African American Writers: Portraits and Visions

Jazz and Twelve O'clock Tales: New Stories
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Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Black Sparrow Press (January 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1574232126
ISBN-13: 978-1574232127
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches

"Every story in Jazz and Twelve O' Clock Tales conveys a fresh verbal improvisation, an unexpected lightness, and the sure understanding of the complexity of the world. Wanda Coleman is a poet and a musician."
— Maryse Condé, author of The Story of the Cannibal Woman and Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves with this collection of thirteen new short stories an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of "Lush Life" by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's right-hand man. Like the heartbroken lover in Strayhorn's song, the characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing and potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, "always simmering," as Coleman writes in the final story, "ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo."

Coleman applies a poet's economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. Or, alternatively, she will step in and take center stage, an omniscient voice seeing beyond the impending and inevitable tragedy, but powerless to change either narrative or outcome. Powerless, that is, only within the bounds of the story, for Coleman is an author devoted to change, personal and political, writing to affect the balance of power in America. "Nothing will satisfy me," she has written, "short of an open society and social parity."

The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors
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ISBN: 1574232002
Pub. Date: February 2005
Format: Paperback, 261pp
Publisher: Godine, David R.

Coleman is best known for her “warrior voice.” [But her] voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood’s neighborhoods – her South L.A.’s wild-frond palms, the smog-smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie Holiday’s tours of sorrow’s more desolate stretches. But it can also land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up comic. – Los Angeles Times

In this, her second collection of nonfiction prose, Wanda Coleman continues the project she began in Native in a Strange Land (1996), a project she once described as “a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through scattered fragments of my living memory.” It is a sometimes antic tour, with unforgettable commentary – Coleman’s “intermittent outcries, moans, shouts, and jubilations along the route.”

The Riot Inside Me once again finds the author at the bloody crossroads where art & politics, the personal & the political, and L.A. & the larger world meet and trade blows before resuming their separate paths. The 26 pieces gathered here – a “hopscotch” of essays, memoirs, interviews, and reports – are divided into four sections. One collects autobiographical pieces, including a haunting memoir of her first husband, a moth drawn to the flames of the more extreme forms of ’60s radicalism. Another section is reserved for polemics, mainly issues of Black & White; a third collects Coleman’s now famous “bad” review of Maya Angelou’s Song Flung Up to Heaven – “the most controversial piece I’ve yet written” – and a caustically funny report on its fallout. The book concludes with a group of essays on race, class, and poetry, pieces that one critic called “sardonic when it comes to politics and groups [but] tender and hopeful when it comes to individuals.”

“Satire and journalism are alive and well in L.A.,” says Publishers Weekly, “at least when Coleman is doing the biting and the reporting.” So is art, and so, of course, is truth.

Ostinato Vamps
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ISBN: 0822958333
Format: Paperback, 104pp
Pub. Date: October 2003
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Read an AALBC.com Review

"A poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque, has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the too-American rift among races and genders (there are more than two of each) for two decades."-From the jury's citation for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Ostinato Vamps continues and enlarges the traits that have been Wanda Coleman's hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line beneath her stanzas.

Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Racing between an earthy eroticism and fatalistic despair, filled with humor and tragedy, these poems are alive. They breathe. They dance. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms.

Griots Beneath the Baobab: Tales from Los Angeles
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Randy Ross (Editor)

Paperback: 190 pages
Publisher: Larod Publishing Company (April 5, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0966267516
ISBN-13: 978-0966267518
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches

Griots Beneath the Baobab, the latest anthology published by International Black Writers and Artists of Los Angeles (IBWA-LA), honors the creative spirit of some of America's most insightful griots—by way of L.A. Griots features powerful stories by noted, award-winning, and best-selling writers Donald Bakeer, Octavia E. Butler, Wanda Coleman, Stanley Crouch, Eric Jerome Dickey, Sikivu Hutchinson, Silas Jones, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Gary Phillips, Randy Ross, Jervey Tervalon, and Ellery Washington.

Mambo Hips and Make Believe
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ISBN: 1574230948
Pub. Date: May 1999
Format: Paperback, 403pp
Publisher: Godine, David R.

Although deep friendship between women seems to be nearly a cliché in fiction, Wanda Coleman has managed to capture it in a fresh way . . . Her narrator, Tamala, is a white girl from the suburbs who recognizes Erlene, an African American, as a soulmate in a confusing world of racial identity, romantic travails, and spiritual bankruptcy. These friends suffer together through indignity, discrimination, abuse, [and] breathless highs and lows. They are not always heroes ... but they attempt to live their beliefs and honor their friendship as best they can, making them two of the most believable characters you’d ever wish to have as real friends.
—Rain Taxi

Mercurochrome: New Poems
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ISBN: 1574231545
Pub. Date: March 2001
Format: Hardcover, 274pp
Publisher: Godine, David R.

Finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry

Wanda Coleman’s poetry stings, stains, and ultimately helps heal wounds like the old-fashioned Mercurochrome of her title. No easy remedy for the lacerating American concerns of racism and gender bias, Coleman’s poetry transforms pain into empathy.... These searing, soaring poems challenge us to repair the fractures of human difference, and feel what it is to be made whole again.
—The National Book Award Poetry Judges 2001, Stanley Plumly, Chair

Bathwater Wine
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ISBN: 1574230646
Pub. Date: April 1998
Format: Paperback, 288pp
Publisher: Godine, David R.

Winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

[Coleman] is a poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque, has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the too-American rift among races and genders, for two decades. [She] excels in public performance ... but her poems do not require [her] physical presence: they perform themselves.
—Marilyn Hacker

Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors
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ISBN: 1574230220
Pub. Date: September 1996
Format: Paperback, 292pp
Publisher: Godine, David

In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles' noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and of herself. Gleaned from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Ms. Coleman says that these pieces offer "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory."

We find the author, who is African-American, laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men's magazine; caught up in militant revolutionary politics; and witnessing even more violent social upheaval in the form of the Watts and Rodney King riots.

While Coleman's life has been one of unique accomplishment, Publisher's Weekly notes, "Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable." In short, this book is a must-read for any student of the American condition.

Related Links

Coleman is included in this Anthology - 360º A Revolution of Black Poets
http://aalbc.com/books/360book.htm

Coleman is Captured in this wonderful Volume of Pictures and Biographies
AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS: PORTRAITS AND VISIONS
by Lynda Koolish
http://aalbc.com/AFRICAN_AMERICAN_WRITERS.htm

Coleman is recorded on OUR SOULS HAVE GROWN DEEP LIKE THE RIVERS: BLACK POETS READ THEIR WORK CD
http://authors.aalbc.com/oursouls.htm

Black Sparrow Books - AN IMPRINT OF DAVID R. GODINE, PUBLISHER
http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com/titles/coleman.htm

Wanda Coleman on AALBC.com