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To Wednesdays 2006

WEDNESDAYS
2005

ANANSI WRITERS WORKSHOP
Jawanza Dumisani, Coordinator
Merilene M. Murphy, Volunteer
Regina Higgins, Volunteer
Wednesdays (7:30-10:30pm)
Workshop at 7:30-8:30pm | Features at 8:30-9:00pm | Open Mic at 9:05pm
$5 donation
No one turned away for lack of funds

FEATURES

JULY 2005

| 07.06.05
NAOMI LONG MADGETT

| 07.13.05

JORGE MONTERROSA

| 07.20.05

HILLARD STREET

| 07.27.05

TAMARA BLUE!

AUG. 2005

| 08.03.05
IMANI TOLLIVER

| 08.10.05

WORLD STAGE CLOSED FOR PAINTING

| 08.17.05

MASAUKO CHIPEMBERE

| 08.24.05

HANNIBAL TABU

| 08.31.05

ISOKE NABAWI

NEW!!!!

Each of our FALL FEATURES will host a Master Class on a topic of their choice from 7:30-8:30pm and segue into a personlly-styled literary expositon from 8:30-9:00pm as the night's featured reader. The reasoning behind us asking featured readers to facilitate master classes is to continue to answer both the education _and_ performance principles we started with in 1989. We ask at the door for a cheaper-than-a-cup-of-designer-coffee donation of $5 and give what we get straight back--no chaser, unwatered, pure. Thanks to our hard-to-book features' mutually high respect for building and sustaining the voices of diversity throughout the contemporary literary canon and supporting community institutions such as The World Stage no matter where in the world they be, irRegardless of the honoraria we manage to eek out from door donations that equal to a little more than the price of two gallons of gas or a cup of designer coffee; thank them, these artists who have gone far and still honor home as a place just like ours to gladly come back to. This Fall at The World Stage Anansi Writers Workshop we are rolling out a brand new program. For the first time in World Stage history, our Anansi Writers Workshop featues will also host Master Classes. This is a way to learn from writers we love and enjoy their writing, too. Don't miss out. Take a look at our radically enlightening and enjoyable Fall line up. Come early and stay late! Don't forget your Ten Spot "fill it up get in free" Card!!!!

SEP. 2005

| 09.07.05
JAHA ZAINABU
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| Writing for Page & Stage

| 09.14.05
A.L. SUTTON
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| Same Wars, Different Page

| 09.21.05
JOSSLYN LUCKETT
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| 10x10 & Other Macondo Miracles

| 09.28.05
LYNN MANNING
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| What's Your Malfunction?!

OCT. 2005

| 10.05.05
ANTHONY LYONS
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| Poetic Prose
View Writing Samples from Anthony Lyons' 10.05.05 POETIC PROSE Master Class Participants

| 10.12.05
THE MAYES BROTHERS
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| The Relationship of Physics to Poetry

| 10.19.05
SEQUOIA MERCIER
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| Art & Healing

| 10.26.05
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| REVISITING GWENDOLYN BROOKS

NOV. 2005

| 11.02.05
RIUA AKINSHEGUN
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| INTRODUCING YOUR ART ACROSS BORDERS

| 11.09.05
THE WATTS PROPHETS
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| THE ART OF TEACHING THE CREATIVE PROCESS


| 11.16.05
KAMAU DAÁOOD
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| THE POWER OF WORDS: POETRY, REVELATION AND TRANSFORMATION


| 11.23.05
WANDA COLEMAN
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| ASK WANDA ALL ABOUT YOUR WRITING BLUES


| 11.30.05
ROBERT HILTON
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| CREATIVITY'S SOUND SPACE

DEC. 2005

| 12.07.05
REG E. GAINES
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| THEATRICALIZING URBAN VOICES

| 12.14.05
SHERI BAILEY
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| WRITING HISTORY/FILLING IN THE SHADOWS


| 12.21.05
KEITH ANTAR MASON
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| POETIC RITUALS FOR BLACK MEN


| 12.28.05
DORIS REED
featured at 8:30pm, leading a Master Class (7:30-8:30pm) on:
| NATURE AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

















NAOMI LONG MADGETT
07.06.05

This evening's scheduled feature, SEQUOIA MERCIER, and Anansi Writer S. PEARL SHARP are responsible for this fine treat.

GUEST APPEARANCE
& QUESTION/ANSWER SESSION
WITH NAOMI LONG MADGETT
WHOSE BIRTHDAY WAS ACTUALLY YESTERDAY

Born July 5, 1923,
NAOMI LONG MADGETT

Writer, editor, teacher and publisher, has long been the moving force behind Lotus Press, Inc., the leading publisher of distinguished poetry by African Americans. Responsible for the publication of 75 titles, she became senior editor of the Lotus Poetry Series of Michigan State University Press in 1993. An award-winning poet in her own right, Madgett has published seven collections of poetry including Pink Ladies in the Afternoon (1972, 1990), Exits and Entrances (1978), Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia (1981), and Octavia and Other Poems (1988) which was national co-winner of the College Language Association Creative Achievement Award. Black Scholar Magazine gave her the Award of Excellence in 1992, and in 1993 the Hilton-Long Poetry Foundation offered its first annual Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award for excellence in a manuscript by an African American poet. Madgett's poems have been included in well over 100 anthologies in this country and abroad and have been translated into several languages.

IMANI TOLLIVER
08.03.05
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Imani Tolliver, poet, visual artist, educator, and community worker, is a graduate of Howard University where she studied English Literature and African-American Studies. Her published poetry can be found in several anthologies and journals, including Cave Canem II, IV, and V, Jones Juke Joint Magic, The Flow: New Black Poetry in Motion, Ghettoes are not Beautiful, Black Love, The Drumming Between Us - A Poetry Journal, Drum Voices Review, Step Into A World - A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Beyond the Frontier, Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets, and the forthcoming, Poetry is not a Luxury: LA Women of Color. During her studies, she was awarded the Lannon Literary Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the John J. Wright Literary Award and presently is a fellow at Cave Canem African-American Writer's Workshop and Retreat. She has been a featured poet across the country, including the Nuyorican Poet's Café, the Smithsonian Institution, Beyond Baroque, the World Stage Performance Gallery, and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage.

JAHA ZAINABU
09.07.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): WRITING FOR STAGE & PAGE
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

This painter/writer/storyteller "lives for a living" in Los Angeles and is the author of THE SCIENCE OF CHOCOLATE MILK MAKING: POEMS (Telepoetics, 2005). In the WRITING FOR STAGE & PAGE Master Class tonight Jaha will help us shake out the wrinkles between what is well-written, poorly performed poetry and poorly written, excellently performed poems. Jaha says, "The two genres--written word and performance poetry are separated, usually negatively, and that need not be." Join us tonight and be sure to bring a notepad for WRTING FOR STAGE & PAGE.

A.L. SUTTON
09.14.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): SAME WARS, DIFFERENT PAGE
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

A.L. (Al) Sutton is a Viet Nam veteran who lives in north Long Beach and writes because he must. Al writes from the frontline having survived two terms in Viet Nam and growing up in South Central Los Angeles. He and his nephew Mark Holman (a Harvard grad from South Central Los Angeles) co-penned "Windows: Navigating City Life" (Telepoetics). Mark says, "My uncle and I first considered working together on Windows when I had just returned from living in Italy in 1994. He wanted me to edit some poems he had written. I told him that the poems could stand on their own but that they could also be woven into a story of recollections as a protagonist took a bus ride through Los Angeles. Needless to say, I was that protagonist, and I coined a lot of the prose as I logged hundreds of miles of bus and light rail trips through metropolitan Los Angeles. I was inspired to link the poetry and prose as I remembered a Middle Ages author named Boethius, whom I studied when I was at Harvard. We studied The Consolation of Philosophy, a Menippean Satire that Regularly alternated prose and verse." Windows: Navigating City Life is Al's first book. After serving two 13-month tours in Viet Nam, Al found work as a licensed aircraft mechanic for several aviation companies until in 1989, when he began suffering from what he would later learn was PTSD and found himself on the nut ward at the V.A. Hospital. It was a V.A. therapist who suggested he write poetry and over the next decade plus, Al has written his feelings in the form of poetry, first about Viet Nam and later about his upbringing in his other war (still going on) in the inner cities across America. Join us tonight and be sure to bring a fearless pen to Al's Master Class: SAME WARS, DIFFERENT PAGE.

JOSSLYN LUCKETT
09.21.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): 10x10 & OTHER MACONDO MIRACLES
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Josslyn Luckett is the daughter of Roland, a psychologist from Mississippi and Barbara, a social worker turned preacher from Maine. Josslyn survived growing up in Irvine, California, has a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from UCBerkeley, an MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University and now lives and writes most days in LA. She has written for theater, television and in 2002 Filmmaker Magazine featured her in their annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film" issue. Her most recent screenwriting gigs were back to back biopics on Gemini rappers, Tupac Shakur and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes. She spends a week most summers in San Antonio writing and facilitating workshops at Sandra Cisneros' Macondo Writers Workshop. In 2005 she was granted a month long residency at Hedgebrook, a women writer's colony in Whidbey Island, Washington where she got to commune with bald eagles, owls and deer as she began early drafts of her memoir.

Join us tonight for Josslyn's feature and her Master Class, 10x10 & OTHER MACONDO MIRACLES. Get the high up on what Josslyn has taught and learned at Sandra Cisneros' Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio, Texas. For 10x10 & OTHER MACONDO MIRACLES, Josslyn says "i would like to talk for the first 20 minutes then have a few poets in the house share work that we could do mini workshop on with some sandra tools."

LYNN MANNING
09.28.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): WHAT'S YOUR MALFUNCTION?!
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Lynn Manning is an award winning playwright, poet, actor, Paralympic Silver Medallist and former Blind Judo Champion of The world. He accomplished all of this after being shot and blinded in a Hollywood bar at age 23. Lynn is currently Technical Advisor to the new hit ABC/Bochco cop drama, BLIND JUSTICE. Lynn's latest play, UP FROM THE DOWNS premiered at the Los Angeles Design Center May 7, 2005.

Mr. Manning is also a critically recognized theatrical performer. New York's Theater By The Blind's 2004 "Off Broadway" production of Lynn's autobiographical solo show, WEIGHTS, received raves from New York reviewers. In Los Angeles, Center Theater Group's original 2001 production of WEIGHTS was not only critically acclaimed, but also won three NAACP Theater Awards, including Best Actor for Lynn. Lynn has since performed WEIGHTS at The Kennedy Center For The Performing arts in Washington, DC; at The 2003 National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and at the 2003 Third International Blind and Visually Impaired Theater Festival in Zagreb, Croatia where he has been invited to reprise his performance at the 2005 festival in October. Lynn will also be touring WEIGHTS in The United Kingdom, November 15 through December 10, 2005.

As a television actor, Lynn has appeared on the TV shows, 8 Simple Rules, Popular, Sienfeld, The Sinbad Show, and Dream On. He has been featured in commercials for Nike Shoes, Hewlet Packard, Schweppes, Bank Of America, Sprint Long Distance, and more. Lynn wrote and starred in the independent short film, Shoot!, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001, world premiered on HBO/Cinemax that same year, and is currently in hot circulation among the cable television networks.

Recognizing a need for theater and theater arts education in L.A.'s underserved community of Watts, Lynn Co-founded the Watts Village Theater Company with Quentin Drew and serves as both President of The Board and Literary Manager. He is also President of the Firehouse Theater Company--dedicated to the involvement of persons with disabilities in all aspects of the theatrical performing arts. Because of such activism, Lynn was KCET TV's Community Artist Unsung Heroes honoree for 2004.

Watts Village Theater Company's 2003 production of Lynn's play, PRIVATE BATTLE, at The Mafundi Institute in Watts, received rave reviews from community and critics alike, as well as an NAACP Theater Award.

Lynn Manning is an active member of the Screen Actors' Guild, Actors' Equity, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. He is also a current member of The Actor's Studio's West-coast Writers/Directors Unit.

In 2001, Lynn completed three years as California Arts Council Artist In Residence with the Mark Taper Forum's "Other Voices Project." As resident, he conducted playwriting and storytelling workshops for the physically disabled and visually impaired.

While pursuing his career in the fine arts, Lynn achieved 'world class' status in competitive judo. He represented the United states in the 1988 Paralympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. He went on to become the U.S. Olympic Committee's "Blind Male Athlete Of The Year" after winning the Blind Judo World Championship at the 1990 World Victory Games in Holland. He also won the first World Cup for blind judo in Italy in 1991, and took a silver medal in the 1992 Paralympics at Barcelona. Now retired from competition, Lynn teaches judo to blind and visually impaired students at the Braille Institute in Hollywood.

Lynn's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary anthologies such as, STARING BACK (THE DISABILITY EXPERIENCE FROM THE INSIDE OUT), and GRAND PASSION, an anthology of Los Angeles poets. His solo spoken word CD, CLARITY OF VISION, was released on New Alliance Records in 1994. Bridge Multimedia of New York produces a 5.1 surround-sound spoken word CD of Lynn's solo show, WEIGHTS.

Lynn's Master Class tonight is WHAT'S YOUR MALFUNCTION?! It's about bringing our real and imagined disabilities to the page and stage. Participants should bring a fresh poem or dramatic monologue (preferably autobiographical) inspired by the subject description to work on.

More on Lynn Manning.

ANTHONY LYONS
10.05.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): POETIC PROSE
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Novelist A.C. Lyons is co-founder of The World Stage Anansi Writers Workshop and a graduate of Cal. State University Long Beach where he majored in English - Creative Writing. He's a Los Angeles native where he continues to live with his wife and five children.

Join us tonight for Anthony's Master Class--POETIC PROSE--a discussion on the importance of poetic language in fiction and creative non-fiction. Twenty-minute lecture followed by 40-minute exercise and participation.

View Writing Samples from Anthony Lyons' 10.05.05 POETIC PROSE Master Class Participants

THE MAYES BROTHERS: MARCOS AND MAURICE
10.12.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): THE RELATIONSHIP OF PHYSICS TO POETRY
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Marcos was born in Indiana. Upon graduating high school he served as a United States Marines in the Persian Gulf. Upon his discharge, Marcos studied the art of exotic male dance, along with modeling and acting and has appeared in such movies as "Phat Beach," in television shows like "The Bachelor," and "The Cupid Dating Show." Marcos now takes up his passion for the drum, preforming with such artists as Malcolm Jamal Warner of "The Cosby show," Shock G of "Digital Underground" and Los Angeles underground queen, Madusa. Listen for Marcos' drum rhythms in the upcoming Tupac Shakur album and in the Honda 2005 US Surf Championships. See Marcos and his musical group "FuMonGoni" perform around Los Angeles, keeping the mood nice and mellow for the ladies and the fellows...

Maurice grew up in Indiana and after high school served in the U.S. Marine Corps guarding American Embassies. Upon completing his enlistment, Maurice attended Indiana State University where he was selected to head the Africana Studies Department Student organizing committee. After college, Maurice went to work in developmental psychology at a specialized treatment facility for adolescent sex offenders. In 1999, Maurice moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in banking. It was during this time where he came upon a passion for physics and performance. Since then, Maurice and his brother Marcos Regularly perform throughout Los Angeles, most currently at the Second Annual Los Angeles Black Book Expo.

Be sure to come early and explore with the Mayes Brothers THE RELATIONSHIP OF PHYSICS TO POETRY.

SEQUOIA MERCIER
10.19.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): ART & HEALING
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Sequoia Olivia Mercier, a practicing Mental Health Counselor, R.N. since 1980, is a poet, community activist and a mother. She is a native of New York who has lived in Los Angeles the majority of her life. She is an active member of the Anansi Writers' Workshop at The World Stage Performance Gallery in Leimert Park and author of Midnite Rainbow.

Join us tonight (10.19.05) for Sequoia's Master Class: ART & HEALING (7:30-8:30pm) and her featured reading from Midnite Rainbow (8:30-9pm). For the ART & HEALING Master Class, be prepared with paper and pen for a 30-minute lecture and 30-minute participatory immersion with Sequoia who says: "Art as a verb, to join, fit together, to unencumber the flow of energy is to heal. Poetry is a life style that has within it the capacity to heal every aspect of our lives if we will allow it. Come prepared to write outside the box of conventional healing modalities. Let's envision together what a troupe of traveling art healers might look like."

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
10.26.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): REVISITING GWENDOLYN BROOKS
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City and grew up in Washington, DC. Her collections of poetry include American Sublime, Antebellum Dream Book, The Venus Hottentot, and Body of Life. She received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Boston University, and the Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

Alexander has read her poetry and lectured on African-American literature and culture across the country and abroad. Her poems, short stories, and critical writing have been widely published in such journals and periodicals as the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Village Voice, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Her poems are anthologized in dozens of collections.

Alexander’s play, Diva Studies, was produced at the Yale School of Drama in May 1996. She is also an acclaimed professor who has taught at Haverford College, the University of Chicago, where she won the University’s top teaching prize, and Smith College, where she was Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-in-Residence and first director of the Poetry Center at Smith College. In the summers, she is a faculty member at Cave Canem Poetry Workshop. She presently teaches in the English and African American Studies Departments at Yale University.

The Master Class tonight is: REVISITING GWENDOLYN BROOKS. Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago's great South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks has been one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. Brooks found worlds in the African-American community she wrote out of, and her innovations remain inspirational to more than one generation of poets who have come after her. Her career as a whole also offers an example of an artist who was willing to respond and evolve in the face of the dramatic historical, political, and aesthetic changes and challenges she lived through. Elizabeth says, "We'll look at some of her [Gwendolyn Brooks'] poems and see what they have to offer us for making poems in the here and now."

RIUA AKINSHEGUN
11.02.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): INTRODUCING YOUR ART ACROSS BORDERS
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Riua Akinshegun--visual artist, writer and performance artist--follows the advice of her creative muse: "Don't worry about growing old, worry about staying new." Akinshegun's artwork over the past 30+ years includes batiks, ceramic masks, sculptures, African wrap dolls and installations. She has exhibited in Guyana, Mali, Nigeria and the U.S., and conducts workshops on art as a healing process.

The Most Mutinous Leapt Overboard, her interactive installation on the Middle Passage (trans-Atlantic slave trade), became the inspiration for S. Pearl Sharp's documentary film, The Healing Passage: Voices From the Water, which premiered in June 2004.

Riua is well traveled and has in her world travels studied with Oshogbo artists in Nigeria, dialoged with Africans in South America in the Rain Forest of Surinam, and in 1998, moved to a flower garden in Baja California, Mexico for four years to focus on writing.

She has performed her poetry and stories for the Armand Hammer Museum, Mark Taper Forum's Chautauqua series, Armory Center for the Arts, and has completed Market Bag, a family story, and is currently working on her autobiography, Home Grown.

Riua is on home turf at The World Stage Anansi Writers Workshop, and for that matter, at home anywhere in the world. Dust off your passports tonight for Riua's one-hour Master Class--INTRODUCING YOUR ART ACROSS BORDERS--and put some bricks in your pockets so you don't fly away during her half-hour feature.

More on Riua Akinshegun.

THE WATTS PROPHETS
11.09.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): THE ART OF TEACHING THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Hip hop's godfathers, The Watts Prophets--Anthony Amde Hamilton, Otis O'Solomon and Richard Dedeaux--brilliantly lit the contemporary literary scene circa 1965 as members of the Watts Writers Workshop, screenwriter Budd Schulberg's catchall creative phoenix rising over post-1965 Watts uprising turf.

TV news devastated Schulberg so, he drove mostly on conviction more miles than it takes to get to Watts from Beverly Hills on fuel alone and there built an institution boastful of the best minds of the time--artists, arts educators and financially well-endowed supporters.

The Prophets were kids then in the sense young Black men in urban America are ever kids. Everybody who knew them knew they could write their behinds off. "Write a little something for my dad's funeral" the requests would come. "Say a little something something" at my baby's naming ceremony, at our wedding. "Pray for me." They were kids who had eaten urgency's fumes fried, frozen and re-fried, salted the conviction of "thing's gon' be greater later" with fatback and outwaited every egregious bone thrown at cultural poverty's hunger long before Schulberg caught the TV signal and leaped the Watts uprising forward to primetime on heart-throbbing poems.

None of them knew each other until the Workshop. They all met in the mid-1960s (say 1967)--Schulberg, still sloshing neck-deep in "On the Waterfront" infamy, Hamilton, O'Solomon and Dedeaux, undeclared writers ready to riff socially and politically conscious poetry accappella or with musical accompaniment; all of them ready to be something greater than the sum of themselves.

Somebody encouraged the trio to enter an Inner City Cultural Center talent show and they did as The Watts Prophets and won second place which led to a residency at John Daniels' Maverick's Flat Club in South Central L.A. and which led, you could say, to who The Watts Prophets are now and what they do today.

The Watts Prophet are all over 2005's cultural map: teaching, touring as speakers, recording, performing. Featured tonight from 8:30-9:30pm, The Watts Prophets lead in with a Master Class from 7:30-8:30pm on The Art of Teaching the Creative Process. Master Class participants, bring the tools of your trade.

More on The Watts Prophets.

KAMAU DAÁOOD
11.16.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): THE POWER OF WORDS: POETRY, REVELATION AND TRANSFORMATION
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

"I was taught that the concept of the local artist is a noble one. That to live and work in a community and to be known for that work, is very dignified."
Kamau Daáood

A mythic figure in the Southern California arts scene, for 40 years Kamau Daáood has poeted and performed second to educating and building community arts as an activist in Los Angeles. Widely revered as one of the generals behind Los Angeles' African and African American cultural renaissance, Kamau is equally respected as one of the City of Angels' annointed poets. With the MAMA Foundation release of Leimert Park, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books publication of The Language of Saxophones: Selected Poems, Kamau unleashes his galvanizing spirit as recorded sound, ready to dog-ear pages. Both the book and the CD pulsate: part griot funk, straight ahead, blues, hip hop and hard bop. Both the book and the CD celebrate Kamau the poet center stage capturing the true essence of African and African American Los Angeles. In celebration of these epiphanies there is no their there, only community and a strange invitation that is signature Kamau--art, entertainment and education.

Kamau's Master Class tonight is THE POWER OF WORDS: POETRY, REVELATION AND TRANSFORMATION. Get here early. When the co-founder of the World Stage teaches, everyone who has come through these doors since 1989 who is in Los Angeles might tonight be here to listen, learn, levitate. The World Stage seats 50. Come early!

More on Kamau Daáood.

WANDA COLEMAN
11.23.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): ASK WANDA ALL ABOUT YOUR WRITING BLUES
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

A native daughter of Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman is the first C.O.L.A. literary fellow for the city of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs 2003-2004. She has transformed 4,500 rejection slips into Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and 14 books including Bathwater Wine for which she received the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and Mercurochrome for which she received a 2001 National Book Award bronze-medal. Wanda's poetry books include Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors (1996); Hand Dance (1993); African Sleeping Sickness (1990); A War of Eyes & Other Stories (1988); Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968-1986 (1988); Imagoes (1983); Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001) and Ostinato Vamps (2003). She has also written Mambo Hips & Make Believe: A Novel, published by Black Sparrow Press in 1999.

Wanda's Master Class is ASK WANDA ALL ABOUT YOUR WRITING BLUES, an extra special hour worth it's weight in gold.

Books by Wanda Coleman and more on Wanda Coleman.

ROBERT HILTON
11.30.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): CREATIVITY'S SOUND SPACE
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Robert S. Hilton designs, makes and plays unique musical instruments, continuing a tradition Hilton established more than 30 years ago. He's been accompanying spoken word artists with music for about half that time, playing with storytellers and poets. Robert's own stories and poetry often include musical content or subject matter. Sometimes they're political or just plain goofy. They're always an honest look at what is on his mind.

Join us tonight for Robert's Master class--CREATIVITY'S SOUND SPACE--which, of course, is about:

. Weaving your words into a web of music.

. Combining poetry or stories with a musical element.

. How music enhances or changes the emotional content of your words.

. How sometimes music is a support or reinforcement of the words.

. How sometimes music and words are of equal importance.

. How sometimes words serve to support the music.

. How sometimes the music is the story and words serve to put the listener on the path.

. How, of course, there are times when there are no words at all.

For the CREATIVITY'S SOUND SPACE Master Class, Robert says, "Bring something you have written or a work in progress. Bring paper and pen. We'll experiment to see what effects different kinds of music have on it." After Robert's Master Class, hang out to test the extrasensory layers of his personal tributes to creativity's sound space as he plays instruments he's made from found objects and instrumentally accompanies poetry and stories he's found by breathing.

More on Robert.

REG E. GAINES
12.07.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): THEATRICALIZING URBAN VOICES
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Reg is author of three books, 24/7/365, HEAD RHYME LINES, and THE ORIGINAL BUCKWHEAT. Reg's next release, 2 B blk & wrt. on B.A.G Lady Press, is due in the Fall 2005. His poetry can be found in the anthologies Word Up, Aloud, Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Bum Rush The Page. Reg's own B.A.G. Lady Press has released BRICK CITY BLUES, the result of a 16-session poetry workshop he led as Writer-N-Residence at The New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2001.

In 1993, Reg appeared on MTV Spoken Word Unplugged, the Fightin' Wordz Series and headlined the MTV Free Your Mind Spoken Word Tour. He has performed his poetry on The Arsenio Hall Show, The Jon Stewart Show, MSNBC's Edgewise and Def Poetry on HBO. In 1994, Reg's PLEASE DON'T TAKE MY AIR JORDANS was the first poetry CD released by Mercury Records. His COUNTEE JAIL RECORDS has released Show & Tell, Hush Project, and film scores including Senior Year, a 13-episode series for PBS.

Reg is a two time Tony Award nominee, a Grammy award nominee and a Bessie Award winner for Best Book/Lyrics for BRING IN DA NOISE BRING IN DA FUNK. His jazz musical, OTHER ASPECTS, was the 2003 Downtown Urban Theater Festival (NYC) Best Play Award winner. Reg served as artistic director for the 2004 DUTF and his play, MURPHY'S LAW, will premier on June 29 at The Cherry Lane Theater in New York.

Reg's theater directing credits include his own OTHER ASPECTS, BLAK by Marcella Goheen, Mongo Affair, Aaron Davis Hall's 25th Anniversary Celebration with Miguel Algarin and Amiri Baraka, Regie Cabico's Straight/Out, Maarteen van Hinte's OJ-Othello, Sadico by Aileen Reyes and The Brick City Playas' Brick City Blues. His film directing credits include Underground Voices starring Saul Williams and Jessica Care Moore.

Reg can be seen in If Trane Wuz Here with Savion Glover and saxophonist Matana Roberts. The piece pays homage to the music of John Coltrane and will begin a 10-city tour in celebration of Black History, February 2006. Reg is Writer-N-Residence for San Diego City College's City Works Literary Magazine Volume 12 and is writer and director for The Instant Theater Project which has performances in July 2005 at The Penn @ Sixth Theater in San Diego.

Reg developed the THEATRICALIZATION OF POETIC EXPRESSION workshops at scratch theatrical (NYC) and has facilitated the workshops around the country as recently as May for the New York City Hip-Hop Theater Festival in conjunction with Youth Speaks in San Francisco.

Exclusively presented as a one-hour workshop for The World Stage, the Master Class tonight is Reg E. Gaines' THEATRICALIZING URBAN VOICES. Tonight, Reg will work with _six_ aspiring poets who want to bridge the gap between contemporary urban poetry and contemporary American theater.

THEATRICALIZING URBAN VOICES is based on poetry which has made the leap from church basements, bars, street corners, poetry cafes and community centers to Broadway & TV such as Melvin Van Peebles' Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, Short Eyes by Mikey Pinero, For Colored Girls… by Ntozake Shange, Reg e gaines' own BRING IN DA NOISE/BRING IN DA FUNK and Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Tonight's _six_ workshop participants will bring poems based on real life or imagined ideas, then recreate their writings into poetic monologues, solo or group plays and dramatic collages. Theatrical components such as Recurring Themes, Reprise and Gear Changing: From Verse to Prose, are fused with solid Poetic devices like Sound Symbolism, Imagery, Rhythm and Rhyme. The understanding of these separate art forms' similarities will open the writer's mind and soul to the possibilities of Poetry as Theater.

First _six_ come with poems to this Master Class, first _six_ served.

The World Stage is an intimate, 50-seat performance and education gallery and we are delighted to be the benefactors of Reg's educative methodologies and to rest our ears on the thumps of Reg's writing heart. Come early.

More on Reg E. Gaines.

SHERI BAILEY
12.14.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): WRITING HISTORY/FILLING IN THE SHADOWS
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

Sheri Bailey is a playwright, filmmaker and community activist in her native Virginia where she lives among family, friends and foes in a region rich in history dating back to before the Revolutionary War. Growing up she felt stifled by that history because it was told from a non-Black, non-female, slave holder's perspective and at 18 she left home running. Ten years ago she returned, founded the non-profit Juneteenth Festival Company and starting writing plays about local history which includes stories about how her hometown of Portsmouth was a major stop on the Underground Railroad because of the ports and the Great Dismal Swamp. The 1831 Nat Turner Insurrection in nearby Southampton County is presented as a general leading his troops in a battle in the war against slavery and not a crazed manic lusting after his master's daughter. A sign of validation and recognition of Sheri's work is a recent commission received from the City of Virginia Beach to create programming for the Commonwealth of Virginia's 400th Anniversary in 2007. Other notable achievements include an NEA Theatre Fellowship and a request from the Huntington Library to house Ms. Bailey's body of work for future generations. Her published plays include Southern Girls (Dramatic Publishing) and Summers in Suffolk: Six One Act Plays with bonus Summer Dreams: A Screenplay (Telepoetics).

WRITING HISTORY/FILLING IN THE SHADOWS--Sheri's Master Class--is based on writing historical stories without proproganda or lies as Stryon did with Nat Turner. This workshop should be dubbed FINDING GOOD STORY IN HISTORY because as Sheri says, "In real life Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder who thought Blacks were intellectually inferior until he became acquainted with Benjamin Banneker who was the grandson of an African prince and America's first great scientist. These two were penpals. When George Washington made Banneker the first Black presidential appointee it was Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson who issued formal invitation to Banneker. In my one-act Ben & Jefferson, they are onstage together in public conversation with a moderator whom Mr. Jefferson feels is showing favoritism to Mr. Banneker as the words of these two great thinkers and tinkers are shared with modern audiences. In my 2 Harriets, Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe meet up in heaven as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the most famous Underground Railroad conductor share their lives in story and song." Sheri asks Master Class participants tonight to bring a short bio about your favorite historical character or event to work on.

More on Sheri here.

KEITH ANTAR MASON
12.21.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): POETIC RITUALS FOR BLACK MEN
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

KEITH ANTAR MASON is a playwright, poet, and performance artist. He writes, directs, and sometimes performs with the Hittite Empire, for which he is the Artistic Director and co-founding member. In addition to its own highly acclaimed repertory of work, the Hittite Empire has collaborated with communities around the United States and in the U.K. to create works that grow from the experiences of young Afrikan American and Afrikan Diasporic men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. KEITH ANTAR MASON is the author of "From Hip-Hop to Hittite and Other Poetic Healing Rituals for Young Black Men: A Retrospective" published by Telepoetics. His master class tonight is POETIC RITUALS FOR BLACK MEN.

More on Keith here.

DORIS REED
12.28.05
Master Class (7:30-8:30pm): NATURE AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Featured Reading (8:30pm)

A Los Angeles based poet, Doris Kay has been writing for over 25 years. Her poetry has appeared in Essence, Science of Mind, Heritage, and Dysonna magazines as well as the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper, numerous books and anthologies. In addition to poetry, she also writes short stories, articles and editorials. Her editorials appear in the Los Angeles Times and Daily newspapers. Doris Kay performs reading throughout the Southern California area inclusive of Borders, Barnes and Nobel Bookstores, Eso Won Books, Beyond Baroque in Venice, and the Equator Cafe. She has performed across the country, appeared on television and had a body of her work enacted in the theatrical production, Patchwork. Recently doing a show in Las Vegas, she also performs at private parties, graduations, fundraisers and other special events. Her poetry has also been performed by others.

Doris Kay had a poem musically scored by the late-great jazz musician Dr. Aaron Bell of New York with whom she performed at the Hudson River Museum in New York, and penned the commemorative poem for KCET's 2003 Black History Month Celebration. Music from her CD, Reflections, is in the movie Fair Game that premiered at the 2005 Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles. In addition to her CD, Doris released her second book, Tending My Garden, in 2004. She is currently working on a children's book entitled, The Spider and The Fly, A Poet's Fable.

Believing poetry to be the looking glass into the soul, Doris Kay feels that as long as her poetry touches someone, somewhere, somehow, the sun will come up tomorrow.

More on Doris Kay Reed.

Tonight's Master Class--NATURE AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS--is for those who want to understand the creative process as a natural process which ebbs and flows through seasons. Doris Kay says, "All of nature, but particularly plants, have an inherent sense of when it is time to grow, to blossom, and to rest. Thus, that is the way we should view our creativity, without guilt when the time comes to rest and let the senses settle."