Photo: ' Derek Beasley.
Pate, born in 1950, is an Associate Professor of African-American and African studies at the University of Minnesota. He teaches courses on fiction writing, English, and literature, and is most proud of his POETRY OF RAP class. His essays and commentary have appeared in the Utne Reader, The Washington Post, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and USA Weekend. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Butterfly Tree, Indigene, Artpaper, and The North Stone Review. Also an avid performance artist, Pate lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Alexs D. Pate's debut novel Losing Absalom received a Minnesota Book Award and was named Best First Novel by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Other novels include the New York Times best-seller Amistad: The Novel, Finding Makeba, The Multicultiboho Sideshow, winner of a 2000 Minnesota Book Award, and, most recently, West of Rehoboth. Pate is Assistant Professor of African-American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota.
West
of Rehoboth
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Amazon
Format:
Paperback, 256pp.
ISBN: 038080042X
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date: August 2002
Edition Desc: 1ST PERENN
Selected for AALBC.com's On-line Book Cub Reading List - December 2003
Set in the early 1960s, West of Rehoboth is the moving story of 12-year-old Edward Massey. Each summer, to escape the heat of Philadelphia, Edward's family moves to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. A pristine resort area untouched by racial integration, Rehoboth Beach offers work for his mother and a sandy playground for his sister. But for Edward'an imaginative boy smitten with Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot'it offers the chance to understand his curmudgeonly uncle Rufus, a man caught in a swirl of hard luck and bad choices.
Forging a tenuous bond, their relationship will take Edward on a harrowing journey through Rufus's past'an amalgam of violence, disappointment, and frustration. As he tries to make sense of the sadness and despair of his uncle's life, Edward must struggle to avoid losing himself to the same destiny.
The
Multicultiboho Sideshow
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Format: Paperback, 256pp.
ISBN: 0380800411
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date: August 2001
In this provocative and searing satire, young, unpublished, African American author Ichabod Word captures and holds hostage unsuspecting law officer Bloom. Icky proceeds to regale Bloom with a rambling tale of anger and woe about Dewitt McMichael, a benefactor of artists of color who is now a garbage bag-wrapped corpse in the corner of his living room. Even if it proves to be his last, desperate act on this earth, Icky is determined to vent in full the bizarre circumstances that led to the latter's demise ' a mind-boggling chronicle of power, immorality, money, political stratification, racial discrimination, brilliant creation, and desecration. Alternately sobering and screamingly funny, Alex D. Pate's The Multicultiboho Sideshow is a blistering and remarkable work that spares nothing and no one.
Amistad
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Format: Mass Market Paperback, 320pp.
ISBN: 0451195167
Publisher: N A L
Pub. Date: October 1997
Based on the true story of the 1839 mutiny on board the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, here is the frightening sequence of events that led fifty-three young men and women - and one young nation - to seek freedom and justice for all people. Amistad is the story of Cinque, the illegally enslaved son of a Mende chief who led an uprising full of fury and courage. It is also the story of John Quincy Adams, the former American president, who reluctantly heeded the call to justice and defended Cinque in a Supreme Court trial that would alter the nation's history. And it is the story of men and women searching to find truth and to uphold the basic tenets of the American Constitution. Brilliantly narrated by award-winning novelist Alexs Pate, Amistad celebrates the human spirit's profound determination to fight, hope, and to be free. (Read a review of the Amistad Movie)
Finding
Makeba
Format:
Paperback, 244pp.
ISBN: 0380731525
Publisher: Morrow,William & Co
Pub. Date: July 1999
Ben Crestfield never meant to become one of those African-American men all the statistics talk about: the ones who father children and disappear. He loved his beautiful wife, Helen, with all his heart, and his daughter, Makeba, was his greatest joy. Ben also had dreams, and talent. He wanted to be a writer, to make a difference, to tell the kinds of stories that never seem to get told. But Helen wanted a house, another baby...Ben felt the soft vines of her love wrap around his neck until he gasped for breath. And so one night, as Makeba played with her stuffed toys and tried to sleep after all the shouting, Ben tiptoed into her room and said good-bye. That was the end, for Ben. His knowledge of his own failure - such a predictable, contemptible failure - built a wall of shame that he thought would keep him from his wife and child forever. He lived alone and wrote. Ben was right about his talent. He sold a novel. His publisher sent him on tour. He sat in bookstores, signing copies, and one day looked up to see a girl facing him. "Sign it for Makeba Crestfield," she said, and Ben recognized his own soft features, his own warm brown skin. As father and daughter struggle to speak the truth to each other, they work toward spiritual healing and toward becoming a family for each other.
Related Links
Pate is featured in:
After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men
edited by Robert Fleming
http://www.aalbc.com/reviews/afterhours.htm
Pate wrote the introduction to Coffee House Press's Publication of John A.
Williams' Captain Black Man
http://aalbc.com/authors/autograp.htm
Interview for the documentary "Literature & Life: The Givens Collection";
features Alexs D. Pate (University of Minnesota) discussing the Black Arts
Movement and his writing.
http://www.pbs.org/ktca/litandlife/resources/pate.html
Biographical Material above excerpted from
Robbins Book Store
http://robinsbooks.tripod.com/oct18.html
The Loft Literary Center
http://www.loft.org/conment.htm
