1968 was the year that I published my first volume of poetry in
a boardside entitled "Dope Huslter's Jazz." The turbulence of 1968 brought the nature of the struggle for human dignity into
view for me. Inaction was no longer possible. I had been a community activist in The Betterment League, an inner-city
community organization that focused on drug intervention and youth guidance, but the chaos of 1968 made me "wanna hollar"
about the larger picture and "the way they do my life." Even those who weren't alive in 1968 will feel the tention of
those times from history books - 1968 was an historic year that will be discussed for centuries to come.
I was born in Hollywood, South Carolina in 1941. My family fled to New York City in 1946 where I grew up
and where I attended public schools. The first school I attended was P. S. 89 in Harlem. It was across the street from
the Countee Cullen's branch of the city's library. My school and the library partnered to run an after school program called
"Story Hour" in which librarians read stories to children after school. This program fired my imagination and planted the
literary seed in my genes. I later majored in English at Fordham Unversity. I joined the army in 1960 and was a member
of the 82nd Airborne Division and I started to read the powerful and artfully simplistic writings of Ernest Hemingway.
This exposure and the dormant literary seed from the Story Hour program, were fertilzed by the events of the time and started
to spout up in me - I had to write.
In 1969, I published "Now See Here, Homes," another collection of poetry that reflected my views as
a community activist by railing against drug dealers. I was cited as "Artist of the Month" by the Nergo Book Club, Inc.
for that work. I help found "Black Forum" magazine in 1973 and was its first editor-In-chief. Black Forum became
a nationally acclaimed magazine for writers. I also edited "Press Time," a very popular literary newsletter for several years.
In between this time, I was also writing a syndicated weekly newspaper column called "Sleepy Willie." Sleepy Willie was
a take-off on Langston Hughes' character "Jesse B. Simple" which employed satircal humor as a means to explore the questions
of race and politics. This led to a book entitled "Sleepy Willie Talks About Life" which was published in 1991. Willie is
a Bronx street-philosopher who fled South Carolina under the threat of death in 1944 and has never crossed the Mason-Dixon
line since. The second book in the series, "Sleepy Willie Sings the Blues" was published in 2001 and was completely comprised
of previously unpublished sketches. The third book in the trilogy, which will return Sleepy Willie, after more than half a
century, back to South Carolina, is coming - I hope..
I had made a seamless switch from poetry to prose in the 1980s, a time when my work was published in major
magizines and newspapers. In 1989, my wife and I relocated to South Carolina and I heightened my focus on fiction prose. "The
Devil Beats His Wife," a collection of short stories was published in 2004. This is a book of short fiction all based in the
Charleston Lowcountry area and except for one, in the modern South with the vast racial changes as a backdrop. I published
"San Juan Hill," a memoir about growing up in the Amsterdam Projects in New York City during the fifties. It's a
coming of age story of how from the wretched arose the worthy. In May 2008, My current book "Subway: Afther the Irish,"
was published. Subway is the story of the ethnic transition in the New York City transit work force that occured in the
sixites and seventies. For the first time, the Irish workers who were retiring were not replaced by their better educated
sons making room for the huge influx of African-American workers. It's an engrossing ride - witty, bumpy and on time.
I now focus on making literary connections in my home state of South Carolina. I've been back home for 20 years, but
still find it difficult to gain a large enough notice among the cultural leaders to make a contribution to the states' active
literary scene.
My work has been published in The New York Times, Essence Magazine, Encore Newsmagazine, Black Books Bulletin,
Disc & That, The Lincoln Review, Blind Beggar Press, Ninety-Six Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, The Point Newspaper,
Nommo, Black Out Loud, and other publications.
