Arthur Flowers is a Vietnam veteran, blues singer, co-founder of the New Renaissance Writer's Guild, and a Memphis native.

Arthur Flowers considers himself a contemporary griot, referring to the storytellers of ancient African societies who passed on the history of their people to future generations through the oral tradition. Using spellbinding "performance poetry", Flowers accompanies his presentations with African instruments.

"There are those of us in African American literature who feel that we are heirs to two literary traditions, the western written tradition and the African oral one, and try in the fusion to contribute something to the evolution of both." - Arthur Flowers

 

I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Arthur Flowers (Author), Manu Chitrakar (Illustrator)

Hardcover: 142 pages
Publisher: Tara Books (November 30, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9380340044
ISBN-13: 978-9380340043
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches

I See the Promised Land traverses the milestones of Martin Luther King Jr.'s short life, ministry, and journey. This graphic narrative brings together two diverse yet dramatic traditions of storytelling. Renowned African American writer and griot Arthur Flowers tells a tale'replete with destiny and the human condition to Manu Chitrakar's extraordinarily vivid and eloquent art of the Patua folk style of West Bengal, India.

"Both evocative and factually rich...Older teens, in addition to adults, will find this to be a standout both as a distinctive graphic narrative that combines two world storytelling traditions and as an examination of King's life and its enduring legacy across the globe."
-Booklist Starred Review

"What excites me most here is how this approach can be used to reconnect the graphic novel to its many amazing antecedent narrative forms from around the world and reconfirms comics as a vast, unending human activity."
-Paul Gravett, author of Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life

"This YA crossover shows King's life expressed through Chitrakar's rich Patua art and Flowers's poetic text."
'Library Journal

"The book's layout is as unique as its prose ... The overall effect is a book that reads more like spoken word poetry than prose and would be just as effective as a performance piece"
--Publishers Weekly, NY, November 2010

Manu Chitrakar: Manu Chitrakar is a Patua artist from West Bengal, India. 

 

Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman
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ISBN: 0971581606
Format: Hardcover
Pub. Date: May 2002
Publisher: Wanganegresse Press

"To create art that impacts the heart and mind of the community requires a vision. Realizing that vision is a lifelong journey. You must prepare yourself for the longgame, the longrun. Be religious about it. Superstitious." 'Arthur Flowers, MOJO RISING

An extraordinary memoir that chronicles not just a life, but also an entire belief system, Mojo Rising follows the enlightened path of an African-American philosophical and spiritual firebrand. A modern-day hoodoo man working his "mojo"-the empowerment of black souls-through the cultivation of hoodoo practice, Arthur Flowers continues a tradition birthed by Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed. With academic and emotional vigor, Mojo Rising fosters the transformation of hoodoo into a twenty-first century afrospiritual ideology and literary framework.

Unflinchingly honest, passionate and ever conscious of his role in the complex evolution of black society, Flowers fuses scholarship and soul-searching into this progressive literary riff.

 

Another Good Loving Blues
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Format: Paperback, 224pp.
ISBN: 0345381033
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc.
Pub. Date: January  1994
Edition Desc: REPRINT

Flowers' Another Good Loving Blues was selected as AALBC.com on-line book club's reading selection for November 1999 read the transcript of our on-line chat.

"I am hoodoo, I am griot, am a man of power," the narrator of Another Good Loving Blues tells us. "My story is a true story, my words are true words, my lie is a true lie - a fine old delta tale about a mad blues piano player and a Arkansas conjure woman. Plan to show you how they found the good thing. True love..." And a love story is what we get. It's Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, in the age when jazz was spelled "jass" and ragtime was just a glint in Scott Joplin's eye. Lucas Bodeen is the bluesman, and Melvira Dupree is the conjure woman he loves. But pitted against them are all the forces of nature - not to mention the clashing of their own stubborn wills - and a society mired in the laws of Jim Crow and the lynch mob. Combining the ancient African storytelling art of the griot with the American offshoots of blues and hoo-doo, Arthur Flowers sings us a story that makes us smile - a story of life, and how love and happiness really happen.

 

Cleveland Lee's Beale Street Band
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Format: Hardcover, 32pp.
ISBN: 0816736529
Publisher: Troll Communications L.L.C.
Pub. Date: February  1996
Recommend Age Range: 5 to 8

Little Cleveland Lee wants to play the trumpet with his big sister's high school marching band, but they just laugh at him until an old bluesman helps them understand what it takes to be a musician.

 

De Mojo Blues
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ISBN: 0345339959
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Pub. Date: September 1986
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc.

Three black soldiers are dishonorably discharged from the Vietnam War due to a mutinous fragging incident. They return home resolved to take on the world, but ambition and poverty begin to dissolve their precious brotherhoodo forged in the trenches of Southeast Asia. To counter this growing fragmentation, the hero prophet of the group, Tucept Highjohn, inspired by a set of mystical bones passed onto him by a dying brother in Vietnam, undergoes 'hoodoo' training in his isolated house on stilts in a wilderness park in Memphis. His new self mastery enables him to relive his memories of Vietnam and to rally his ex companions in arms with a vision of the triumph of blackpeople everywhere.

This rich first novel about the Vietnam inheritance of three black combat veterans, written in an original rhythmatic prose, marks the debut of a gifted young black novelist.

 

Related Links

Rootwork Website
http://www.rootwork.com

weblog: rootwork the rootsblog: a cyberhoodoo webspace
Timely Observations on Politics, Literature, Culture, Struggle and the Hoodoo Way
http://rootsblog.typepad.com/rootsblog

Rootwork: Arthur Flowers, Zora Neale Hurston and the Literary Hoodoo Tradition http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_2_36/ai_89872241

NYU's Honored Speaker's Series
http://www.csudh.edu/univadv/IDH0101/Honors_Speakers0101.html

Syracuse University Page
http://www-hl.syr.edu/depts/english/cwp/flowers.htm

 

Photo credit: Troy Johnson, AALBC.com