75 7TH STREET
6PM
RACINE, WI
6PM (doors open 5:30)
KIRAN VEE (aka Bellse Soneek) is a writer, musician, producer, and youth advocate from Milwaukee, WI. He is best known for his powerful and engaging live performances with hip hop fusion quintet, Fresh Cut Collective. Winner of the Wisconsin Area Music Industry (WAMI) award for best hip hop group, Fresh Cut Collective has been building a substantial regional following for the past few years, and has had the honor of performing with such hip hop legends as The Roots, De La Soul, and Slick Rick. In 2012, Kiran was named Most Influential Milwaukeean in the area of arts and culture. He is currently working on his thesis project for the Master’s program in the Liberal Studies department at UWM. The project is a film built around nine original songs that explore the rights of passage that individuals go through in asking the question “Who am I?” and how those personal quests for authenticity–for truth, for the real–fit into a larger picture in an increasingly connected global society.
A graduate of Case High School, Kiran is very excited to come back to Racine and perform.
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QURAYSH ALI LANSANA is author of They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (Third World Press, 2004) and the poetry collection Southside Rain (Third World Press, 2000); The Big World, a children’s book, (Addison-Wesley, 1999); and three poetry chapbooks, bloodsoil (sooner red) (Center for the American Land, May 2009), Greatest Hits: 1995-2005 (Pudding House Publications, 2006) and cockroach children: corner poems and street psalms (nappyhead press, 1995). His work has been published widely in journals and magazines across the country and internationally, including Callaloo, American Poetry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. He is Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at Chicago State University, and a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. Passage, his poetry video collaboration with Kurt Heintz, won the first ever Image Union/Bob Award from WTTW-TV (PBS). Quraysh earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where he was a Departmental Fellow. He has been a literary teaching artist and curriculum developer for over a decade and has led workshops in prisons, public schools, and universities in over 30 states.
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CHING-IN CHEN is author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). A Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, Ching-In is part of Macondo, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities, and Sharon Bridgforth’s Theatrical Jazz Institute. They have been awarded fellowships from Soul Mountain Retreat, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony, and the Norman Mailer Center. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, and Boston. They are cream city review’s editor-in-chief.
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BONK! 