Join host Jeri Rogers as she speaks to Nikki Giovanni about jazz, Jane Goette about her newly published novel, & Italian Poet, Alessio Zanelli
The renowned poet, Nikki Giovanni has a new album “The Gospel According To Nikki Giovanni.”
In addition to publishing dozens of poetry works, Nikki Giovanni has recorded several spoken word albums over the course of 50 years. But this time, she’s doing something a little different.
The new album, a collaboration with saxophonist Javon Jackson, is a collection of gospel hymns and spirituals set to jazz. Growing up in the Baptist church, Giovanni says gospel music was instrumental to understanding herself as a poet.
“The spirituals had a message,” she says. “They weren’t just some people woke up one morning or came from working in the evening and said, ‘Oh, let’s sit down and sing.’ They were sharing information with each other.”
” The truth exists in the world and it is the job of the poet to pull the truth out of violentical air and place it with care upon the page to be casted from the mouth to the hearts of the people.”
– Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother, Irreversible Entanglements)
Nikki with Jovan recording at Final Track Studios with co-producer, Skip Brown
Jane Goette’s novel, A River Road Memoir is a journey through a young girl’s idyllic childhood in the rural South to her restless adolescence when the Civil Rights struggle becomes urgent and personal to her family. The unfolding story is told through the second daughter’s eyes. Jane is a serious child, the one her father calls, “a tree full of owls,” always thinking, observing, and wondering about meanings. Unresolved conflicts continue around the family table as the Civil Rights movement evolves, the Vietnam War begins, and chemical plants spring-like poison mushrooms along the river. Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the conflicts reflected in this book are hauntingly familiar to readers today as Americans continue to battle over the nation’s identity and values.
Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English, a language he has learned completely as an autodidact. His work has appeared in some 200 literary journals from 17 countries including, in the USA: Artemis, California Quarterly, Concho River Review, Italian Americana, The Lyric, North Dakota Quarterly, Philosophy And Literature, Potomac Review, Worcester Review, and World Literature Today, among about a hundred more. His fifth original collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, was published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information please visit www.alessiozanelli.it.
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