would not usually share videos of readings like so (it’s a you-had-to-be-there-with-me kinda complex), but am againalways remembering the call of purpose, role-making, and the sublimation of mourning.
we are forced to see the inferno of violence & little me believes we should recall the carvings of rain in our mouths.
snippet 1 - my first of two times on The Stage at PS1 reading from Jayne Cortez’s “There It Is.”
snippet 2 - reading from the end of my manuscript-book length poem Weep Not for The Brooklyn Rail
This past weekend, I had the honor—alongside @thecanteenkilla and @syldubenion —of opening the night with a reading of works by Cuban poet and friend Nancy Morejón, as well as one of my own originals. The evening was keynoted by Bruno Rodríguez, Cuba’s Foreign Minister, who, at the High-Level Segment of the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, continued to denounce both the genocide in Palestine and the U.S. blockade and sanctions on the Cuban people.
The night was hued by historic developments: the passing of Assata Shakur, the centennials of both Malcolm X & Fidel, the movement in the streets against Netanyahu’s visit to the UN, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and the relentless blockade against Cuba.
What do these markers demand of us? A call to action. An insistence that internationalism guide the struggle against white supremacy and capitalism at home. How would history remember Assata Shakur without Cuba? How will we struggle for a free Palestine? How will we build and tend to our future—how will we construct socialism, the vision Assata fought for, and the only viable alternative to the violence of the present system?
The choice is ultimately ours and ours alone.
TOCORORO • A poem I began composing in my mind during my last trip to Cuba and took a little while to make it into what it stands as now. It is named after the Cuban variety of the trogon bird species, the national bird. According to almost all stories, this bird dies in captivity. Tocororo, nicknamed for the sound it creates.
Today, and most days, I think of Cuba. I think of the sky that is ours and no one else’s.
In our first artist salon, Taking Sides—Artists on the Frontlines, Mtume Grant, Sabri Sundos, and Marina Magliore joined a conversation moderated by Jaylen Strong. Together with the audience, we explored what it means for artists not only to take clear positions against injustice as individuals, but also to become part of collective movements capable of defending and advancing the vision of a better world.
✅🔗 It’s not too late to register, watch classes asynchronously, and study with us. Sign up at peoplesforum.org/takesides
Tonight, the People’s Forum hosted our first artist salon as part of the series The Artist Must Take Sides. The salon, Artists on the Frontlines, brought together scholar and educator Marina Magloire, painter and textile artist Sabri Sundos, and filmmaker Mtume Gant for an evening of art, history, and political reckoning moderated by Jaylen Strong. Inspired by the many spaces of gathering of artists and cultural workers at important junctures in history, tonight’s salon created a space of exchange and collective inquiry among artists and cultural workers.
Each featured artist grounded the salon in their practice, tracing the lineages of politically engaged art they draw from, and reflecting on how their work cultivates purpose, engagement, and a call to action. The moderated discussion pushed deeper, examining what it means to take sides not as moral abstraction but as a practical and creative challenge; distinguishing symbolic solidarity from active participation, and centering the question of what it looks like for artists to integrate themselves into political movements.
The evening opened with a solo performance by Seth Sandoval and closed with a moving performance by the Palestinian Youth Choir.
Tonight’s salon reminded us that we are not navigating this moment alone, but that the lineage of revolutionary artists throughout history and those building the movement today are shining the path forward!
It’s not too late to sign up for this course - we have two classes and one artist salon left in this series. Register now at peoplesforum.org/takesides
TODAYS EPISODE OF ALONE TOGETHER IS WITH MY GOOD FRIEND @jaylentstrong . HE IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE PEOPLE TO SPEAK TO. I ADMIRE HIM AS A FRIEND BUT ALSO A SPEAKER. THOUGH HE IS A THINKER HIS IS NO ARM CHAIR POLITICO. HE ORGANIZES AND IS OFTEN IN THE STREETS WORKING WITH NO NONSENSE PEOPLE MAKING REAL MOTION HAPPEN.
WATCH NOW ON YOUTUBE AND SPOTIFY
Directed by @newyorknico
Producer: @ashaefia
DP: @amaal.mov
B-cam: @sammotademi
1st AC: @tomfenaille
Sound: @brauliolin
Gaff: Clemenence Therin
Editor: @itai_zwecker
Color: @everydayisalifetime
Location: Joes Ginger
Join us tomorrow, Tuesday May 5 for the first Artist Salon in the series The Artist Must Take Sides: Culture & The Movement Past, Present & Future - it’s not too late to sign up! Join now at peoplesforum.org/takesides.
The salon, titled ‘Taking Sides — Artists on the Frontlines’ will feature scholar & educator Marina Magloire, painter & textile artist Sabri Sundos, and filmmaker Mtume Gant, moderated by Jaylen Strong. Through art and discussion, we will bring history and theory to life — examining what it means to be an artist and cultural worker taking sides today.
Join us!
🗓️ Tuesday, May 5, 6:30pm ET
💻 📍 HYBRID! Everyone from all locations, backgrounds, and identities are welcome to register! Participate in-person in New York at The People’s Forum, or virtually from anywhere in the world.
✅ Register now at peoplesforum.org/takesides
Today marks 14 years since the absurdly violent murder of my pregnant sister by her boyfriend, the father to be. Brutally stabbed almost a hundred times to an unrecognizable degree. In one day she stood next to me and in some short hours later she vanished. The funeral, a closed casket, and my last memory of her was a brown box.
Every year, and in fact in a multitude of ways—every day—is a battle of reorganization in how to live in this world: how to wake every day and disregard a hatred for it; how to look at the attractive venture of cynicism and dismay and not choose the vehicle of anger; how to instead make a beckoning for unabashed gratitude and a determination that the world need not be how it is now—that the world is not full of inhumanity, but rather that inhumanity is stoked and manufactured by the nature of a vast inequality determined by a dominant culture of the few: the billionaire elite, the white supremacist, the misogynist, the transphobes, the christian zealots, the capitalists.
When in the case of the murder of a beloved it is difficult to move away from the subject of the terror, the murderer. It is difficult to take a materialist route to better understand that one man is not simply at fault. The statistics in the U.S. alone of intimate partner violence is a leading driver of reorientation in the blaming of one person. Through all of my shared grief I know that the root of this problem is in the system of our living, it is in how capitalism denigrates human life.
What is most important to me in this small analysis—looking at the soured roots of a plant—is that the only way to change the livelihood of the branches, the leaves, the bark is to completely uproot the barbarous origins from its source. To turn the soil, to plant a new seed, and to bear a new tree. We need an entirely new society. We need a new world where violence draws ever closer into obsolescence.
For my sister, I choose always to make a future worth living in. Today, I can’t exactly hear her laugh or quite remember the tenor of her voice which brings me an excruciatingly dull pain, but I see her smile and in each of her teeth lie a doorway into a promise for tomorrow.
🎨 Our newest political education course, The Artists Must Take Sides, is a call to action. It invites artists, cultural workers, and everyone who engages with art—that is, all of us—to come together and make the fight for a better world irresistible.
As Claudia Jones said, “A people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.” In this course, we’ll explore what it means to reinvent that genesis—to begin a new chapter in the moment we’re living through now.
Together, we’ll study, imagine, and develop creative, innovative ways to build the better world we know is possible.
🔗‼️ The Artist Must Take Sides begins Tuesday, April 21 at 6:30 PM. Sign up here: peoplesforum.org/takesides
I’m taking the new class, The Artist Must Take Sides, presented by @peoplesforumnyc and @againstapartheid.art . It’s a free series with in-person and hybrid lectures, plus panel discussions and artist salons—one of which I’ll be moderating.
As artists, we should already be asking what it means to take a stance and to organize as cultural workers. The creative industries we exist in often pit us against each other, fostering unhealthy competition and isolation, largely for the benefit of company owners, institutional boards, and executives. This class is an opportunity to think critically about that dynamic and explore how we get organized collectively.
There are no tests or mandatory assignments, you shape your own experience.
Sign up at: peoplesforum.org/takesides
It’s sometimes hard to comment on a protest movement in the streets, and it’s sometimes hard to say what the direct result of mobilization is. But what is clear in this moment is this: when there is a protest in the middle of New York City, and hundreds of people stop to record, cheer, chant, join the protest, happily receive movement literature, and unequivocally make a point to say they stand with you—there is a consensus on the collective outrage and the desire for complete change in the society of the United States.
Only the genocidal, maniacal weapons manufacturers and the ‘Epstein’ political and ruling class want war. War and bloodbaths are what make them rich. This is the cycle of capitalism that reveals its true purpose, a cycle of profit by the process of barbaric exploitation.
It is up to us to literally reupholster the entire country, to win and take power that centers a people-first agenda. Not a war and destruction first system.
It is up to us to get organized and put a stop to this. It is up to us alone—and now, truly more than ever, is our time to change the world.
No War on Iran 04.08.26
