I am very honored tonight to be able to present to you
poet and writer Quincy Troupe.
He's the author of 13 books, including
six volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is Choruses.
He's a professor of creative writing
and American and Caribbean literature at the University
of California San Diego.
He's the founding editorial director of Code,
a monthly style magazine for men of color,
and director of Artists On the Cutting Edge,
a reading and performance series held
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.
Many of you know him as a featured author
on the Bill Moyers PBS special, The Power of the Word.
He's also the co-author with Miles Davis
of the best-selling 1989 book, Miles, the Autobiography.
And in 2000, he published Miles and Me,
a memoir of his friendship with the great jazz man.
Troupe has won two American book awards-- in 1980
for Snake-Back Solos, in 1990 for the Miles autobiography.
He's won many, many awards and distinctions,
toured in Europe, US, Africa, Canada, Mexico, Brazil.
His 13th book-- one that my grandsons are going to be
extremely excited about--
[LAUGHS] is Take it to the Hoop, Magic Johnson,
which seemed to have come about in a serendipitous way when
an editor realized that his poem for Magic
could serve children very well.
And now, there's another children's book
coming out which will be on the singer Stevie Wonder.
He's also completing a novel, another memoir,
and a screenplay based on the Miles memoir.
In addition, his selected poems will be out in 2002
from Coffeehouse Press, and in 2003
his book of essays and critical articles will be out.
As if this exuberant record of artistic accomplishment
is not enough to demonstrate the fearlessness of Troupe's
creative spirit, let me offer one small example
of how he can find the music--
the beauty in all places.
In January 1996, artist and sculptor Mathieu Gregoire
asked him to participate in a collaborative project
for the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Diego.
You might think an unpromising location for poetry.
Troupe's contribution are the Point Loma poems, some of which
are published in choruses--
poems that will become inscriptions,
sandblasted into the granite of the 25-acre facility,
into the walls, along the paths, including haiku and tanka poems
that have been written for the underground work areas
where no sunlight shines.
These are poems in which he's had the courage
to urge the workers who spend their dayless days in there--
"Think of making love to the work that you do here.
Think of it as a song--
music whispering, a breeze, a tongue of someone you love."
Please welcome Quincy Troupe.