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| Marvin X, also known as Marvin Jackmon and El Muhajir
Marvin X is most well known for his work with Ed Bullins in the founding of Black House and The Black Arts/West Theatre in San Francisco. Black House served briefly as the headquarters for the Black Panther Party and as a center for performance, theatre, poetry and music. Marvin X is a playwright in the true spirit of the BAM. His most well-known BAM play, entitled Flowers for the Trashman, deals with generational difficulties and the crisis of the Black intellectual as he deals with education in a white-controlled culture. Marvin X's other works include, The Black Bird, The Trial, Resurrection of the Dead and In the Name of Love. He currently has the longest running African American drama in the San Francisco Bay area and Northern California, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE, a tragi-comedy of addiction and recovery. He is the founder and director of RECOVERY THEATRE. Marvin X has continued to work as a lecturer, teacher and producer. He has taught at Fresno State University; San Francisco State University; University of California - Berkeley and San Diego; University of Nevada, Reno; Mills College, Laney and Merritt Colleges in Oakland. He has received writing fellowships from Columbia University and the National Endowment for the Arts and planning grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Read: Marvin X Unplugged An Interview by Lee Hubbard Marvin X is available for lectures/readings/performance.
Contact him at xblackxmanx@aol.com.
Black Bird Press Marvin X has done extraordinary mind and soul work in bringing our attention to the importance of spirituality, as opposed to religion, in our daily living. Someone—maybe Kierkegaard or maybe it was George Fox who—said that there was no such thing as "Christianity." There can only be Christians. It is not institutions but rather individuals who make the meaningful differences in our world. It is not Islam but Muslims. Not Buddhism but Buddhists. Marvin X has made a courageous difference. In this book he shares the wondrous vision of his spiritual explorations. His eloquent language and rhetoric are varied—sophisticated but also earthy, sometimes both at once. Highly informed he speaks to many societal levels and to both genders—to the intellectual as well as to the man/woman on the street or the unfortunate in prison—to the mind as well as the heart. His topics range from global politics and economics to those between men and women in their household. Common sense dominates his thought. He shuns political correctness for the truth of life. He is a Master Teacher in many fields of thought—religion and psychology, sociology and anthropology, history and politics, literature and the humanities. He is a needed Counselor, for he knows himself, on the deepest of personal levels and he reveals that self to us, that we might be his beneficiaries. All of which are represented in his Radical Spirituality—a balm for those who
anguish in these troubling times of disinformation. As a shaman himself, he
calls too for a Radical Mythology to override the traditional mythologies of
racial supremacy that foster war and injustice. If you want to reshape (clean
up, raise) your consciousness, this is a book to savor, to read again, and
again—to pass onto a friend or lover.
ISBN: 0964067218 In the Crazy House Called America is available from Black Bird Press, 11132 Nelson Bar Road, Cherokee, CA 95965, $19.95. Contact Marvin X at: mrvnx@yahoo.com. "Rarely is a brother secure and honest enough with himself to reveal his innermost thoughts, emotions or his most hellacious life experiences. For most men it would be a monumental feat just to share/bare his soul with his closest friends but to do so to perfect strangers would be unthinkable, unless he had gone through the fires of life and emerged free of the dross that tarnishes his soul. Marvin X, poet, playwright, author and essayist does just that in a self-published book entitled In The Crazy House Called America. This latest piece from Marvin X offers a peek into his soul and his psyche. He lets the reader know he is hip to the rabid oppression the West heaps upon people of color especially North American Africans while at the same time revealing the knowledge gleaned from his days as a student radical, black nationalist revolutionary forger of the Black Arts Movement, husband, father lover, a dogger of women did not spare him the degradation and agony of descending into the abyss of crack addiction, abusive and toxic relationships and family tragedy.
Perhaps because of the knowledge gained as a member of the Nation of Islam,
and his experiences as one of the prime movers of the cultural revolution of the
'60, the insights he shares In The Crazy House Called America are all the
keener. Marvin writes candidly of his pain, bewilderment and depression of
losing his son to suicide. He shares in a very powerful way, his own out of body
helplessness as he wallowed in the dregs of an addiction that threatened to
destroy his soul and the mess his addictions made of his life and relationships
with those he loved. But he is not preachy and this is not an autobiography. He
has already been there and done that. In sharing his story and the wisdom he has
gleaned from his life experiences and looking at the world through the eyes of
an artist/healer,.."
Format: Paperback, 140pp. Book of poetry by Black Arts activist, preface by Lorenzo Thomas. "When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express Black male urban experience in a lyrical way." James G. Spady, Philadelphia New Observer.
Related Links Read: Marvin X Unplugged An Interview by Lee Hubbard
Movie Reviews by Marvin X on AALBC.com include: Ali Baby Boy Ray Traffic
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Marvin X was born May
29, 1944 in Fowler, California, near Fresno. Marvin X is well known for his work
as a poet, playwright and essayist of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT or BAM. He
attended Merritt College along with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. He received
his BA and MA in English from San Francisco State University.
BEYOND RELIGION, TOWARD
SPIRITUALITY, ESSAYS ON CONSCIOUSNESS 
In the Crazy House
Called America
Love and War: Poems
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