This week on the podcast it’s an NYU affair with a side of Columbia University, Harvard University and UCLA. I first met my guest as fellow New York University students/alumni in the late 1990’s, at a time when slam poetry was beginning to reaching global audiences with influences from hip hop music and other activist movements. Fast foward after more than 20 years to earlier this spring when our paths crossed again at an event hosted by fellow Glocal Citizen and Director of NYU Accra, Chiké Frankie Edozien - The Labone Dialogues.

Bryonn is a poet, actor, prison activist, playwright, scholar, author, hip hop artist and professor of African American Studies, Theater, Film & Television, and World Arts & Cultures in the School of the Arts and the School of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Playing over 40 characters, his one-man show, LYRICS FROM LOCKDOWN, won “Best Solo Performance” from the LA Weekly and the NAACP. Executive produced by the late and great, Harry Belafonte, the show tells stories of wrongful incarceration through spoken word poetry, hip hop theater, calypso, comedy and classical music. He founded the Prison Education Program at UCLA in 2015 and in 2019, the program and his performances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts were featured on the debut episode of LA Stories, which won an Emmy Award.

His work has been featured on a diverse range of stages including the Apollo Theater, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Public Theater (NYC), National Black Theatre (Harlem), NJ PAC, The Actor’s Gang Theater (Culver City), Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC), Festival de Liege (Belgium), M-1 Theater Festival (Singapore), Universidad de las Americas (Mexico) and Muteesa Royal University (Uganda), Rikers Island (New York), Marion Prison (Ohio), TEDX at Ironwood State Prison and Sing Sing Prison.

He has performed at over 250 colleges and prisons in the U.S., Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. And soon in Ghana!

Where to find Bryonn?
https://www.bryonn.com
On LinkedIn
On Instagram

What’s Bryonn reading?
A Survey of Muhammad Ali Biographies

What’s Bryonn watching?
Concerning Violence

What’s Bryonn listening to?
Blues Women

Other topics of interest:
What is a Calypsonian
About Veteran Black Panther Jamal Joseph
About Akuse Prison in Ghana
90’s music roll-call - The Fu-Schnickens, Digital Underground, Tupac Shakur
About Pedro Noguera
About Delroy Lindo
Sinners the film
About Michael A. Jordan

Special Guest: Bryonn Bain.

This week’s episode has been in the making since Episode 122 guest, Natasha Moore. I’m joined by interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, scholar and educator, specializing in dance forms of the African Diaspora, Winston Benons, Jr. He has extensive training in Afro-Cuban, Haitian, Afro-Brazilian, and Bomba dance, complemented by studies in Horton and Dunham modern dance techniques. He has curated and led intensive programs in culture and dance techniques in both New York City and Cuba. He is the Founder and Director of tRúe Culture & Arts, an organization dedicated to facilitating cultural exchanges, workshops, and academic residencies.

His works and studies have explored the intersections between Theater and Performance Studies, Curation and Visual Culture culminating in his graduate thesis entitled Marked: The Racialization Of African Phenotypes And Creation Of An Embodied Archive. Also an educator, he served as a lecturer at Pace University and an adjunct faculty member at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He has also held guest faculty positions at Ballet Hispánico, Peridance, Djoniba Dance & Drum, and Cumbe. He is currently the US/MS IB Dance educator at Brooklyn Friends School.

Recent choreography and direction credits include Amahl and the NIght Visitors and What Lies Beneath with On Site Opera, where he also served as the cultural advocate. Most recently, he developed and performed part 1 of a series entitled Conversations with Rothko at the SMART Museum in Chicago.

Where to find Winston?

the-culturalist.com

On LinkedIn

On Instagram

On Facebook

What’s Winson watching?

Barry Jenkins, Moonlight and other works

Dianne Reeves

Other topics of interest:

From British Guiana to Guyana

The Country of Five People

Madeira Islands

What’s The Highline?

How Chemical Bank became Chase Bank

ASWAD - Assocation for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora

Wideman Davis Dance

Special Guest: Winston Benons, Jr..

The first Tuesday in November represents the official US election day. As polling evolves for higher participation and greater inclusion, most states offer early voting so millions have already cast thier votes. Throughout this year of elections across the globe, the build up to the two where I have a say, the United States and Ghana, has played a critical role in inspiring my most activist self to move the dial in different ways toward manifesting a new world. Coincidentally, this week on the podcast kicks off our Writing as Activism series in coordination with the Pa Gya! Literary Festival in Accra. Recorded live at the eighth installment of the festivaland in the days that followed, starting the panel, Writing as Activism: Ghanaian Voices and Pan-African Perspectives Across Genres, the conversation starts with a distinguished voices covering works of poetry, screenwriting, and nonfiction scholarship with:

Nicole Amarteifio is an acclaimed Ghanaian-American TV/film writer, director, and producer. She successfully launched the hit web series 'An African City’ - dubbed by CNN and the BBC as Africa’s answer to ‘Sex and the City’.

Returning Glocal Citizen, Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist artist, researcher and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. In addition to curating artistic programmes, she creates visual narratives, research and performance texts. Nydia's first book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of LW's Radical Black Women book series. She is also developing an artist film, Amy and Me in the Archive, which will be screened at the forthcoming Singapore International Photography Festival 2024.

And Poet Laureate of Jamaica, Kwame Dawes, author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica. He is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2024-2027).

Click through to find out more about the Pa Gya! Literary Festival and the Writer’s Project Ghana and watch this and other festival panels at WPGTV.

Where to find Nicole?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On Facebook
On YouTube
On X

Where to find Kwame?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On X
On Facebook

Where to find Nydia?
On Glocal Citizens
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On X

Other topics of interest and the Essential Pan-African Activism reading list coming soon!

*This audio recording has been edited for clarity from the original video recording.

Special Guests: Kwame Dawes, Nicole Amarteifio, and Nydia Swaby.