Gift

in my inbox from Migritude's official digital artist, Deamer Dunn.

He says:

It is a Double Delight - my favorite rose, for its complex color and aroma. It's scent is layered with vanilla and spice. I also pick up a kind of creamy fruit fragrance, like a lychee, that gives it an aroma that I imagine would exude from a loving soul...

Publications

The Winter 2009 issue of The Literary Review, international journal of contemporary writing, is out now. Its theme is:

Africa Calling: New Stories. New Perspectives. New African Writers.

It carries an excerpt from Drum Rider on the back cover. That's the publishing equivalent of top billing :-). And another of my poems, Jacaranda Time Villanelle, inside.

Shilling Love appears in Chimurenga 14, alongside writing from Mahmood Mamdani and Amitav Ghosh, among others. The latest issue of this brilliant Cape Town-based cultural and literary journal, Everyone Has Their Indian (a quote from Miriam Makeba) features words and images on the Third World project and links, real and imagined, between Africa and South Asia.

aching beauty

There's a kind of beauty that makes the roof of my mouth ache. Contracts the muscle fibres of my diaphragm to fill my lungs from bottom up. Sets up a tingling in my fingertips, a glad exhilaration in my deepest intelligence as it pulls me in, engages all my synapses.

I find it mostly in visual and material art. The soapstone sculptures of Elkana Ongesa. The pieces of Magdalene Odundo, world-renowned Kenyan ceramicist who was guest of honor at the just-concluded ALA in Vermont.

For the past four days, I've had the unbelievable privilege of daily conversations and encounters with Magdalene Odundo. Of listening to her talk about her work. Of sharing our experiences as Kenyans, artists, women. Of having her see me perform, hear me deliver papers, and pay me the highest tribute an artist can receive: genuine, heartfelt congratulations from a virtuoso, a trailblazer, a master in her field.