Dark Matter

by Sheree R. Thomas

  LINDA ADDISON is a member of a writing group, Circles in the Hair (CITH), that has been meeting every other week since 1990. She spends her days writing computer programs and nights writing science fiction, poetry, and anything else that falls out of her brain. Her collection of SF, fantasy, horror short stories, and poetry, Animated Objects, is available from Space & Time. She is on the Honorable Mention list for the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (1997–1999). Catch her work in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Going Postal, the Urbanite, Dark Regions, and Edgar.

  AMIRI BARAKA, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amiri Baraka, began his career in the East Village as a significant contributor to the Beat Generation literary movement and later became one of the major leaders in the Black Arts Movement of the sixties. He published his first work, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, a collection of poems, in 1961 and produced his Obie Award–winning play The Dutchman three years later. In 1965 he founded the Black Art Repertory Theater/School in Harlem, a critical development in the movement of the later 1960s and early 1970s. He is perhaps best known for his poem “Black Art,” his barometric collection Home: Social Essays, and Blues People, an exemplary text on the cultural tradition of black music.

  STEVEN BARNES is the author of fifteen novels, including the best-selling Legacy of Heorot (with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle). He has written for virtually all media, including film, television, stage, newspapers, magazines, and comic books. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Cable Ace, and Endeavor awards. Born in Los Angeles, he currently makes his home in Washington state, with his daughter Lauren and his wife, novelist Tananarive Due. He can be reached at www.lifewrite.com.

  DERRICK BELL, a visiting professor at New York University Law School, was dismissed by Harvard University from his position as Weld Professor of Law for refusing to end his two-year leave protesting the absence of minority women on the law faculty. He is the author of several collections, including And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Question for Racial Justice (1987), Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home (1997), and the critically acclaimed Afrolantica Legacies (1998), in which a mysterious new land mass emerges that proves deadly to everyone, save blacks. His short story “The Space Traders,” from his collection Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), was adapted for film and appeared in the HBO® original movie Cosmic Slop (1995).

  OCTAVIA E. BUTLER is the author of eleven published novels, including Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay’s Ark, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents. She has won both of science fiction’s highest awards, the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award, for work included in her short-fiction collection Bloodchild. As one of the few African American women writing science fiction, she has received widespread praise for her exploration of feminist and racial themes. Winner in 1995 of a MacArthur Award, she lives in the Seattle area.

  CHARLES W. CHESNUTT (1858–1932) was an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, journalist, and biographer. Chesnutt became the first African American fiction writer to receive critical and popular attention from the predominantly white literary establishment and readership of his day after publishing his short story “The Goophered Grapevine” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to free parents of mixed racial heritage, and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Chesnutt was “light-complected” enough to “pass” in white society—a point duly noted by all the reviewers of his day. Nevertheless, Chesnutt never denied his black ancestry or accepted the elitism of the developing black and mulatto middle class, a decision that gained him criticism from many blacks as well as whites. Chesnutt’s early short stories made him the first American author to explore the range of black experience in fiction, presenting readers with authentic black folk culture.

  SAMUEL R. DELANY is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City. He is the author of Dhalgren (1975) and Atlantis: Three Tales (1995), as well as the nonfiction works Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) and 1984. He is currently a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo.

  W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868–1963) was an American historian, essayist, novelist, biographer, poet, autobiographer, editor, and activist. He was the first black Ph.D. from Harvard, one of the founding fathers of American sociology, the founder of both the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, and edited its journal, The Crisis, which published some of the trailblazers of the Harlem Renaissance. As a major force in helping define black social and political causes in the United States, he is perhaps best known for his 1903 volume The Souls of Black Folk, in which he introduced the concept of “double consciousness” and explored the role of blacks in American society. He is also well known for his historiography and pioneering role in studying black history (in 1909 he conceived of the Encyclopedia Africana, the first comprehensive history of the African diaspora), as well as his activism, prompting Herbert Aptheker to call him one of the eminent “history makers” of the twentieth century.

  TANANARIVE DUE’s dark fantasy novels The Between (1995) and My Soul to Keep (1997) are journeys into supernatural suspense that have been finalists for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Awards; the latter was named one of the best novels of 1997 by Publishers Weekly. In 1999 she was named author of the year by the national Go On, Girl Book Club. In 1996 Due was profiled in a “Women & Horror” segment on the Sci Fi Channel, which also featured author Joyce Carol Oates. Her sequel to My Soul to Keep, titled The Living Blood, will be published in the coming months, while her current novel The Black Rose (June 2000) takes her in a new direction: Written in conjunction with the estate of Alex Haley—Haley had intended to write the book himself before he died in 1992—the novel fictionalizes the life of C. J. Walker, America’s first black female millionaire. Tananarive—pronounced tah-nah-nah-REEVE—is a former columnist for the Miami Herald. A former “lifelong” Floridian, she now lives in Longview, Washington, with her husband, science fiction novelist Steven Barnes.

  HENRY DUMAS (1934–1968) was a poet, short fiction writer, and mythopoetic folklorist. Born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, Dumas spent his early years “saturated” with religious and folk traditions of the South. The potency of these roots can be seen in his first collection of short stories, Ark of Bones and Other Stories (1974), edited by his friend and colleague, poet Eugene Redmond. Dumas’s promising career was cut short when he was “mistakenly” shot down by a New York City Transit policeman on May 23, 1968. Due to Redmond’s dedication to keeping Dumas’s literary legacy alive, readers were able to later discover the posthumously published collections Goodbye, Sweetwater (1988) and Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989). His poetry also appeared in Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974). Dumas’s work was inspired by folk roots and by African American music, particularly blues and jazz. Dumas studied with Sun Ra and developed a craft that was distinctly his own vision.

  ROBERT FLEMING is a journalist, short story writer, and author of several books, including The Wisdom of the Elders and The African American Writers Handbook. His articles and book reviews have appeared in numerous national publications. Fleming lives in New York.

  JEWELLE GOMEZ is an activist and writer whose work has appeared in innumerable journals and anthologies. They include Children of the Night, Home Girls, Daughters of Africa, and Afrekete. She is the author of five books, including the award-winning The Gilda Stories, the first black vampire novel published in the United States; more Gilda stories can be found in two new anthologies from Firebrand Books, To Be Continued One and Two. Her stage adaptation of the novel was commissioned and performed throughout the United States by the Urban Bush Women Company in the 1996 season. Gomez also coedited, with Eric Garber, a collection of fantasy fiction entitled Swords of the Rainbow. She has written reviews and articles for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, Ms. magazine, and Essence.

  In 1968 she was on the original
staff of Say Brother, one of the first weekly black television programs, produced in Boston, and later was on the staff of Black News and The Electric Company, both produced in New York City. She was featured, along with Steven Barnes, Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, and Samuel Delany, in the first conference of black fiction writers of the United States, held at Clark Atlanta University in 1998. Born in Boston, she lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Visit her web site at www.jewellegomez.com.

  AKUA LEZLI HOPE gives all praises to the second-generation West Indian Harlemite parents who gave her permission to read Animal Farm, 1984, and Brave New World in the fifth and sixth grades of moving-on-up, integrated, 1960s Queens. She treasured Campbell’s Analog as brain food. SF was her life’s literary launch pad and she was honored when a poem made it into Asimov’s. Hope read Delany as a teen and Butler when she almost gave up on the genre. She is grateful to them for pathmaking. Some particulars of this incarnation: three degrees ivy league—B.A., M.S.J., and M.B.A.; poeting and signifying always, in formal print consistently since 1974; won NEA, NYFA, and Ragdale’s Africa-U.S. fellowships; Writer’s Digest Award for Embouchure: poems on jazz and other musics. Her first show of glass and mixed-media sculpture, in 2001 at Chicago’s Miles Aduwaa Gallery, will be accompanied by Shield, a book of poems from ArtFarm Press. Watch the web www.servtech.com/~artfarm. Make good manifest. Love.

  NALO HOPKINSON spent a pan-Caribbean girlhood living in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana before eventually settling in Toronto, Canada. She draws on that hybrid heritage to write fables of new worlds that will never be. Brown Girl in the Ring, winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, traced the black hole collapse of Toronto into a gated fiefdom controlled by a druglord and haunted with the spirits of the elder Afro-Caribbean gods. Her second novel, Midnight Robber, is a girl’s science fiction adventure story; a post-post-millennial tale of colonization and exile inna rapso stylee.

  HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS has won awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for Women Writers, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, and her book of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State University Press) was picked by Lucille Clifton for the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in African American Review, At Our Core: Women Writing About Power, Brilliant Corners, Callaloo, Catch the Fire!!!, Obsidian II, and Poet Lore.

  ANTHONY JOSEPH was born in Trinidad and has lived in London since 1989. He has published two collections of experimental texts, Desafinado (1994) and Teragaton (1997). He has also performed his intensely rhythmic “disembodied poetic jazz” throughout the UK and at present is at work on his first novel.

  TONY MEDINA teaches English at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. Named by Writer’s Digest as one of the top ten poets to watch in the new millennium, he is the author of the poetry collections Emerge & See, No Noose Is Good Noose, Sermons from the Smell of a Carcass Condemned to Begging, and Memories of Eating. He also coedited the award-winning anthology In Defense of Mumia and was a special editorial director for Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry. “Butta’s Backyard Barbecue” is from his original manuscript 40 Shorties. Medina can be reached at tonymedina@erols.com.

  PAUL D. MILLER is a writer, artist, and musician based in New York City. His writing has appeared in magazines as diverse as Spin’s Guide to Music, the Village Voice, Artforum, the Source, Rap Pages, Paper magazine, Ray Gun, and many others. He is also a senior contributing editor of one of the major magazines covering Digital Art and Culture, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts. His artwork has appeared in numerous gallery and museum shows, most recently the Whitney Biennial, and his first solo show occurred at Annina Nosei. His most recent albums, Riddim Warfare and Subliminal Minded: The E.P., feature a wide variety of guest artists from a wide variety of genres. Kool Keith, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Killah Priest of Wu-Tang Clan, Pharoahe Monche, Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine, and a host of other artists have collaborated with him under his persona DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. In 1998 Miller composed the score for the independent film Slam, starring spoken-word artist Saul Williams, winner of the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d’Or at Cannes. He is currently at work on his next album, Jumbo Mumbo. Visit his website at www.djspooky.com.

  WALTER MOSLEY is the author of twelve books and has been translated into twenty-one languages. His books include the nationally best-selling Easy Rawlins series of mysteries; the Socrates Fortlow stories; the blues novel RL’s Dream; and Blue Light, his first science fiction novel. His most recent book, Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History (Library of Contemporary Thought, 2000), uses the perspective of race history to examine the American economic and political machine.

  AMA PATTERSON is an attorney, legal editor, and single mother. Originally from New York, she now resides near Minneapolis. She is a graduate of Spelman College and the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop.

  ISHMAEL REED published his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, in 1967 and has since published seven novels, including the critically acclaimed work Mumbo Jumbo; four volumes of poetry, including D Neoamerican Hoodoo Church; two collections of essays; numerous reviews and critical articles; and has edited two major anthologies. Reed is best known for his use of parody, satire, and fantasy in his novels. He is founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, which bestows the American Book Awards, and he is the publisher of KONCH magazine, as well as an online student publication, Vines. Reed has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and is the only writer to have been nominated for America’s National Book Award in both fiction and poetry. He lives in Oakland, California. Visit www.ishmaelreedpub.com.

  LEONE ROSS is a critically acclaimed writer with English and Jamaican parentage. Her stories have been published in several anthologies in Britain and Canada. She has written two novels: All the Blood Is Red (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction, and the critically acclaimed Orange Laughter (1999), which will be republished in 2000 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Leone works as a creative writing teacher and is presently writing her third novel. She lives in London.

  KALAMU YA SALAAM, a New Orleans writer, is founder of the Nommo Literary Society, a black writers’ workshop; cofounder with Kysha Brown of Runagate multimedia; leader of the WordBand, a poetry performance ensemble; and moderator of e-Drum, a listserv of over six hundred black writers and diverse supporters of literature. His latest book is the anthology of Nommo writers, Speak the Truth to the People, edited with Kysha Brown. Salaam’s latest spoken-word CD is My Story, My Song. He can be reached at kalamu@aol.com.

  KIINI IBURA SALAAM is an artist and world traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. She constantly seeks to expand her understanding of self through contact with cultures of the African diaspora. A writer since 1990, Kiini crafts short stories, essays, and poetry that celebrate and question the mysteries, victories, and challenges of life. Her work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals and magazines nationwide, including Dark Eros, Men We Cherish, and African American Review, and Essence magazine. She is currently developing Bloodlines, a fictional biography of her ancestors that examines the parallels between her ancestors’ struggles for freedom and her own search for identity. She is also a visual artist and a member of Red Clay Arts. She can be reached at tendaji@hotmail.com.

  CHARLES R. SAUNDERS, a native of Pennsylvania, has lived for the last three decades in Canada, where, in the intervals between teaching the social sciences, “the odd creative writing seminar,” and publishing nonfiction, he has been writing African-based fantasies since 1971. His short fiction has appeared in The Best Fantasy Stories of the Year, in the anthologies Amazons I and Hecate’s Cauldron, and he published three novels for DAW: Imaro, based on his popular short story series; Imaro II: Quest for Cush, and Imaro III: The Trail of Bohu. He is currently working on a non-Imaro African fantasy.

  GEORGE S. SCHUYLER (1895–1977) is consid
ered to be one of the twentieth century’s leading satirists and critics. His acerbic wit and comic approach to social commentary invites comparison to the work of Ishmael Reed. During his long and prolific career as a journalist, Schuyler produced Black Empire and Black No More: Being An Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933–1940, on which the bulk of his literary reputation is based. Schuyler also published a collection entitled Ethiopian Stories.

  NISI SHAWL’S short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Daughters of Nyx, and Semiotext(e) Science Fiction. Gnosis Magazine and The Stranger, Seattle’s notorious newsweekly, have printed her articles and reviews. Nisi moved to Seattle from Ann Arbor, Michigan, as directed by her ancestories. She is a volunteer and board member for the Clarion West Writers Workshop. In her spare time, she works forty hours a week at Borders Books and Music, unpacking shipments and running writing and critique groups.

  EVIE SHOCKLEY writes short fiction and poetry like her life depends on it (and maybe it does!). Her work has been anthologized in Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of African American Poetry (1998) and Jane’s Stories: An Anthology of Work by Midwestern Women (1994). She has also published in such journals as Blue Mesa Review, Callaloo, Obsidian III, and the North American Review. A chapbook of her poems, The Gorgon Goddess, will be published in 2001 (Carolina Wren Press). Evie currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Duke University.

  DARRYL A. SMITH remains, at his best, a skinny, nappy-haired mama’s boy. One incorporated by the pick of the peculiarly fluidic and funktified Christian, hip-hop, Gen. “X-Cold War,” and subaltern sci-fi wisdom-cultures of Las Vegas, Nevada. At his antisocial worst, he is simply one among what the plainspoken call “the irresponsibles.” Darryl is a natal philosopher and a proto-poet who is told that for a religious humanist, he is far too often given to rambunctious deification of the women in his family, who every day make a way out of no way in a world of unfreedom. In 2000 he will (finally) take his M.Div. degree from Harvard Divinity School and thereafter continue reading toward his Ph.D. in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. It is to his niece, Madison, to her mother and his, and to the gift and gravity of memory itself that he dedicates the piece appearing in this volume. He can always be reached and will always be teached at thecoalchamber@hotmail.com.