Modern Griots Recap: Highlights from Black Comic Book Festival

Attending the Black Comic Book Festival for the first time this year introduced me to a wide scope of the comic book world from the lens of the black community and so I wanted to share some of the creators and their works that I came across while there. It was difficult walking around the […]

Moving on the Wires: This Week’s News and Posts

Sorry I did not post for most of the week; I have a slight sprained wrist, so I had to slow down a bit on writing. But anyway, here is some news articles and written pieces from the week: *Martin Luther King in Science Fiction on i09 *”Playing a Minority Forecaster in search of Afrofuturism: […]

MLK: Who His Dreams Were For

This is jazz singer, Jose James’, Martin Luther King, Jr.-inspired song, “The Dreamer:” “I saw the dreamer raise his hand Into a world of possibilities” While today many will try to appropriate and sanitize his image and legacy for their own agendas (looking at you PETA), let us remember that King fought for the freedom […]

Moving on the Wires: Articles and Posts from This Week

Below are some news stories and opinion pieces that I collected over the week. Since Facebook is changing up its system of how posts are viewed and is fishy with what it considers as “violating community guidelines,” I will post the articles I come across during the week on Sunday along with posting them there […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Curwen Best

I was searching for Caribbean science fiction, which is frustrating because most of the first results are for Pirates of the Caribbean (ugh!), but anyway, I stumbled across Bajan scholar Curwen Best and his analyses of the intersections between technology, the internet, social and other media, and Caribbean culture and identity. He has written a […]

Modern Griots Recap: Divination 101

Divination (n): the art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers. Divination, Science and Technology, Transhumanism and Futurism: Definition, including implied ones, are important because they affect our perceptions. That is true for some modern […]

Moving on the Wires: My New Logo and Interview with Artist Estella Yu

Today, I am presenting my second surprise — my new logo for my blog! My friend from high school, Estella Yu, designed it for me. I love it and as I told her, it’s like my own bat signal. Another thing about the Aker image I noticed that I didn’t until now is that the […]

Modern Griots Tribute: RIP Amiri Baraka

If you have seen the top of my blog, you would see that the tag line is a quotation from Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), “the future is always here in the past,” which was one of the last lines in his essay, “Jazzmen: Diz & Sun Ra.” So, as you can see Baraka was an […]

New Year’s Treat: I Am Singing the Ishmael Reed Blues

I am nervously posting these since I have not recorded and posted myself singing anything for a few years now. But I was reading Ishmael Reed’s (author of Mumbo Jumbo) collection of all his poetry and noticed that he wrote a number of blues poems. While reading them, I felt compelled to sing them and […]