2:00 - 4:30
An afternoon of powerful words and performances as Bay Area artists and creatives come together to honor the legacy of Maya Angelou. Through poetry, music and reflection, this program will explore how Angelou's profound work and life continue to inspire generations.
Public Historian Dorothy Lazard will provide a historical perspective on Angelou’s impact on both African American and American history, setting the stage for a night of artistic celebration. With selected poets reading from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and sharing their own works. Featuring Avotcja, Dorothy Lazard, Tureeda Mikell, Darius Simpson and Raymond Nat Turner.
Curated by Dr. Kim McMillon.
Avotcja is a storyteller, poet, musician and DJ whose work blends fierce honesty with musical and poetic mastery. Known for her attention to detail and passion for justice, she has performed widely, captivating audiences with her truth-filled words and music. Avotcja’s poetry resonates with the rhythms of jazz, blues and urban life, drawing praise from artists and scholars alike. She has been hailed as a unique and invaluable cultural voice, weaving together stories of struggle, triumph and the beauty of everyday life with her band, Modúpue.The accompanying musicians include Sandi Poindexter, Baba Ken Okulolo, and Francis Wong.
Dorothy Lazard grew up in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an expansive network of family, and hungry for knowledge. Today Lazard is celebrated for her distinguished career as a librarian and public historian, and in these pages she connects her early intellectual pursuits to the career that made her a community pillar. As she writes with honesty about the challenges she faced in her youth, Lazard’s memoir, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, recounts her Bay Area upbringing in the '60s and '70s, revealing a hunger for knowledge that propelled her into a distinguished career as a librarian and public historian. Celebrated for her journey, she intertwines personal growth with historical events, offering a triumphant narrative of resilience, curiosity, and enthusiasm.
Tureeda Mikell, story medicine woman, poet, educator and activist for holism, Black Panther Alum, and UCB Bay Area Writing Project fellow is an Oakland native. Ngugi wa Thiongo called her—the word magician. She received the 2024 Berkeley Poetry Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Appears in numerous anthologies, most recent release, Black Fire This Time, Vol. 2 and Revolutionary Poets Brigade. Advocating for youth, Mikell has published over 73 student anthologies from five Bay Area counties. She has traveled or Zoomed extensively from Egypt to China. Author of Synchronicity: The Oracle of Sun Medicine (2020) nominated for the California Book Award, Patrice Lumumba Anthology, (co-curated 2021), and her full-length magical-realism collection, The Body: Oracle of Memory, Black Lawrence Press, 2024.
Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, and performer from Akron, Ohio, with an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Mills College. He received the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Author of Never Catch Me (Button Poetry, 2022), his work appears in POETRY Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and American Poetry Review. Darius advocates for the dissolution of empire and total liberation for all oppressed people. Free the People. Free the Land. Free All Political Prisoners.
Raymond Nat Turner, "The Town Crier," is a New York City poet and Artistic Director of the JazzPoetry Ensemble UpSurge!NYC. He has performed at the Harriet Tubman Centennial Symposium, Monterey Jazz Festival and Panafest in Ghana. Currently Poet-in-Residence at Black Agenda Report, his work has been published in various anthologies and outlets. A former Co-Chair of the New York Chapter of the National Writers Union, Turner has opened for figures like James Baldwin, sportswriter Dave Zirin and Congresswoman Barbara Lee.
Dr. Kim McMillon is a producer, playwright, and editor of Black Fire—This Time (Willow Books, 2022). She contributed to Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio University Press, 2021) and produced the 2016 Black Arts Movement Conference at Dillard University. McMillon has also co-produced UC Merced’s Black Arts Movement Conference and edited a special edition of The Journal of PAN African Studies on the Black Arts Movement. Her one-woman show, Confessions of a Thespian, was staged in Berkeley, and her children’s book, The Healing Book of Me, is set for release in late 2024.
Connect:
Dorothy Lazard - Website | Dorothy Lazard - Instagram