Jstheater
@jstheater
Author of some books & more, professor, translator, artist+ 🏳️🌈 🖤💚❤️ 🏳️⚧️ (Avatar: c/o I.D. Mag/photo © Mario Sorrenti)
Wackiest AI scam email I've received yet--I'm invited, under an incorrect name, to participate in a Boozy Book Lovers' (!) chat in DC for a book I've never written about a state I've never visited. The actual author appears to be an AI creation too. Good times, good times 🤡!
Back in 2014, at her show at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in NYC, I rounded a corner & there Ms. Saar was (I got to say hello to a hero in person)!
Apropos of the *Odyssey* conversations, I haven't seen anyone mention the great African American classisict Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (AB, PhD Harvard, taught for most of his career at Howard), who wrote 2 foundational books about Black people in antiquity.
& we did get the firework display & no rain so far, but whew is it muggy out there!
Fireworks over Hoboken & Bayonne but lightning & ominous clouds over the City.
Fellow writers, in case you needed a boost, Pope Leo XIV has got your back.
Last month the editors of The Passage Podcast invited me to discuss my novella "Gloss" & it was a fun conversation, encompassing the Haitian Revolution, US history & more. It's available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts & Spotify.
Excited to have this new issue on of Brick: A Literary Journal, in hand. Among the treasures inside, Christina Sharpe (TY!!!) in dialogue w Steve McQueen, an interview w Salman Rushdie, poems by Anne Carson & Barbara Tran & the “Obsessions” of many writers, including yours truly.
Apparently they're envisioning a libertarian/right-wing low-to-no regulation quasi-"network state"/hub, w/ an AI-driven data center etc. near rare earth minerals and uranium (!) that they can rule like their personal fiefdom.
A perennial to start the new year (w/ one addition - avoid AI if you can)!
To end 2025 it looks like @criterionchannl.bsky.social closed out its various FrantzFanon-related films as of last night (several are on @kanopy.com), but to start 2026 it added Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's acclaimed *The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire,* which I'm looking forward to.
I admit to being a 1-person PR spox for #JayWright but I'm glad to see his *Transfigurations* (aka Collected Poems Pt 1) is finally out now in the UK. Though he's 1 of the greatest living poets in the English language/greatest living Black poets this didn't happen until he'd reached 91 years of age!
So wonderful to see #EssexHemphill featured in the MTA's Arts & Design "#Poetry in Motion" series! The poem, "Thread," is from *Love Is a Dangerous Word* (@NewDirections, 2025), ed. by Robert Reid-Pharr & yours truly! (h/t photo by Tynan Kogane, ND)
Let's try this again, w/ me spelling her name correctly: The scammer-spammers are getting ridiculous now. Did they really think I thought I'd been sent $ or invited to a wedding--or anything--involving MacKenzie Scott? I promptly sent it to the fraud/phishing folks at my service provider.
A reminder: "Public approval of Donald Trump’s presidency has dropped by 6 percentage points since April and his approval rating is now 20 points underwater, 38-58, according to a new national University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll of 1,000 respondents conducted July 25-30." Including immigration👇
Dear Politicians, sending me SMS texts like this make me *less* likely to support you. The deluge of these has to stop. & Apple needs to take blocking these numbers seriously.
Reading this entry, in addition to a number of scholarly works on figures like Burroughs I thought of Denée Benton's excellent portrayal of writer & activist Peggy Scott on @hbo.bsky.social's *The Gilded Age*. Rarely do we see figures like Burroughs/Scott depicted in US fictional media.
Remembering #EricGarner, sharing this poem by Ross Gay, posted by poet Othuke Umokoro, from TwX:
A few more books I was able to find in Lisbon. (I saw someone reading *Afropean* back in 2021 outside Chelsea Marker & have been meaning to pick it up & I’ve been translating Aleixo for a few years now.) I mailed everything back so fingers crossed they all arrive!
I also got to hear the translator, scholar & biographer Richard Zenith speak last week. A few years ago I wrote an essay on this Pessoa book, using 2 older translations of his, as well as 3 other translators’ versions & the 1982 original & now he’s issued a new edition (cf below).
Today’s book haul; the bookstore cashier noted the books I was buying & urged me to get an additional one (by Agualusa), since the 4 authors I’d chosen were all Brazilian or Lusophone African.
Opening tomorrow, Life-a group show, curated by artist & poet Arnold J. Kemp, at Artists Space in NYC! (I'll have 2 poems in the exhibit, which features work by visual artists, poets, performers & more) May 29-August 9, 2025 artistsspace.org/exhibitions/...
Tomorrow evening, at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, in conjunction with @NewDirections, the book launch for #EssexHemphill's *Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems* (2025), 8 pm doors open, RSVP required www.poetryproject.org/events/love-...