Two of Troupe's books, Miles: The Autobiography (1989) and
Snake-Back Solos (1979), have won the American Book Award.
He lives between New York City and Montebello, Guadeloupe, with his
wife Margaret.
The Pursuit of Happyness
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by Chris Gardner, Quincy Troupe, Mim Eichler Rivas
ISBN: 0060744863
Pub. Date: May 2006
Format: Hardcover, 320pp
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
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The astounding yet true rags-to-riches saga of a homeless father who raised
and cared for his son on the mean streets of San Francisco and went on to become
a crown prince of Wall Street. At the age of twenty, Chris Gardner arrived in
San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised
everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high
finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry level position at a prestigious
firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging
circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler
son. Motivated by the promise he made to himself as a fatherless child to never
abandon his own children, the two spent almost a year moving from shelters, "HO-tels",
and soup-lines. Never giving in to despair, Gardner makes an astonishing
transformation from being part of the city's invisible to being a powerful
player in its financial district. Here is the story of a man who breaks his own
family's cycle of men abandoning their children, a story that appeals to the
very essence of the American Dream.
The Architecture of
Language
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ISBN: 1566891892
Pub. Date: October 2006
Format: Hardcover, 110pp
Publisher: Coffee House Press
In the Whitmanic tradition, Troupe's poetry explodes from the page, capturing
the spirit of America. Inspired by contemporary art, music, literature, and
sports, The Architecture of Language dismantles the dangerously cliched, wooden
rhetoric saturating our national discourse and rebuilds the language in poems
bursting with beauty, energy, and enough imaginative fire to light the way to
the future.
Featured on two PBS poetry series, Quincy Troupe is the author of seven volumes
of poetry, including Transcircularities,a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the
Year and a selection in the Minnesota-based Talking Volumes book club.
Miles and
Me
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Format: Hardcover, 256pp.
Publisher: University of California Press
Pub. Date: March 2000
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Review
Quincy Troupe's candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a
revealing portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique
relationship. It is also an engrossing chronicle of the author's own
development, both artistic and personal. As Davis's collaborator on Miles: The
Autobiography, Troupe--one of the major poets to emerge from the 1960s--had
exceptional access to the musician. This memoir goes beyond the life portrayed
in the autobiography to describe in detail the processes of Davis's spectacular
creativity and the joys and difficulties his passionate, contradictory
temperament posed to the men's friendship. It shows how Miles Davis, both as a
black man and an artist, influenced not only Quincy Troupe but whole
generations.
Troupe has written that Miles Davis was "irascible, contemptuous, brutally
honest, ill-tempered when things didn't go his way, complex, fair-minded,
humble, kind and a son-of-a-bitch." The author's love and appreciation for Davis
make him a keen, though not uncritical, observer. He captures and conveys the
power of the musician's presence, the mesmerizing force of his personality, and
the restless energy that lay at the root of his creativity. He also shows
Davis's lighter side: cooking, prowling the streets of Manhattan, painting,
riding his horse at his Malibu home. Troupe discusses Davis's musical output,
situating his albums in the context of the times--both political and
musical--out of which they emerged. Miles and Me is an unparalleled look at the
act of creation and the forces behind it, at how the innovations
Miles: the Autobiography
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by Miles Davis, with Quincy Troupe
ISBN: 0671725823
Pub. Date: January 1990
Format: Paperback, 448pp
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Miles Davis--a performer famous for not talking tells all: from his brilliant
musical debut with Charles Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, to his creative
encounters with such greats as John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock; from his
recording of such classics as Porgy and Bess, to his pioneer work in the jazz
fusion movement. Serials in Vanity Fair and Spin Magazine.
For more than forty years Miles Davis has been in the front rank of American
music. Universally acclaimed as a musical genius, Miles is one of the most
important and influential musicians in the world. The subject of several
biographies, now Miles speaks out himself about his extraordinary life.
Miles: The Autobiography, like Miles himself, holds nothing back. For the
first time Miles talks about his five-year silence. He speaks frankly and openly
about his drug problem and how he overcame it. He condemns the racism he has
encountered in the music business and in American society generally. And he
discusses the women in his life. But above all, Miles talks about music and
musicians, including the legends he has played with over the years: Bird, Dizzy,
Monk, Trane, Mingus, and many others.
The man who has given us some of the most exciting music of the past few
decades has now given us a compelling and fascinating autobiography, featuring a
concise discography and thirty-two pages of photographs.
Choruses Poems
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ISBN: 156689090X
Pub. Date: October 1999
Format: Paperback, 111pp
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Quincy Troupe launches a pyrotechnic display of jazz rhythms, political
commentary, sports tributes, travelogues, and architectural abstracts in his
latest volume of poetry, Choruses. Merging traditional poetic form with
contemporary content, Troupe fashions "words & sounds that build bridges toward
a new tongue" -as he writes in 'Song,' an ars poetica. Only Troupe could write a
sestina chronicling the mass suicide of Heaven's Gate, or a villanelle for
Michael Jordan: 'rising up in time, michael jordan hangs like an ikon, suspended
in space / / his eyes two radar screens screwed like nails into the mask of his
face.' A masterful technician, Troupe experiments with free verse as well,
repeating the same words in three different line-break configurations in
"Images: Three Variations of Shape & Form." From haiku to tonka, from Mark
McGwire to Sammy Sosa, from bebop to hip hop, these choruses "become sound
tracks lifted off a poet's tongue, / / syllables, within moments, are
transformed into song. . . ."
With oracular power and the boldness of jazz improvisation, these poems by
the acclaimed biographer of Miles Davis celebrate modern African American life
without shying away from sharp critiques of social injustice. Where ahead-of-the
curve ideas and canonical form intersect, there you will find our best
modern-day troubadour.
Avalanche
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(Jose Bedia (Illustrator)
ISBN: 1566890454
Pub. Date: April 1996
Format: Hardcover, 128pp
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Troupe heaves a cold, smacking "rush of objects" down an American
mountainside of dreams and injustices. A respected chronicler of the lives of
James Baldwin and Miles Davis and the son of a prominent Negro league catcher,
Troupe (Snake-Back Solos) is an innovator of form and tone who shifts quickly
from a lofty, elegiac mode into burlesque or smoky, jazzed-down pop phraseology.
He plays on history, "riffin' on in full of rain & pain/ spacin' on in on a
sound/ like coltrane." But Troupe also registers history's price, as in repeated
images of an old manboth perpetrator and victim"holding his age tight as two
opaque roses/ in cataracted eyes." Troupe is still at his best when he indulges
in deep, obsessive curves into music: "caaa-rack// the assonance of sound
breaking from ground/ breaking away from itself & found in the bounding
syllables of snow/ moving now." He writes with unchecked expression, redundant
and inclusive. If it were any more laden, Avalanche would be inchoate. Any less
would be our loss. –Publishers Weekly
Little Stevie Wonder
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Lisa Cohen (Illustrator)
ISBN: 0618340602
Pub. Date: April 2005
Format: Hardcover, 32pp
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Age Range: 5 to 9
Eleven-year-old Stevland Judkins Morris Hardaway hit the big time when he
signed a Motown recording contract. At the age of thirteen, Little Stevie Wonder
had millions of fans dancing to the number-one song in the nation.
Little Stevie Wonder is the true story of a boy who lost his sight shortly after
birth, grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and became one of the twentieth century's
most creative and influential musicians—an instrumentalist, singer, songwriter,
musical innovator, and cultural activist.
Here in Quincy Troupe's joyful poem and Lisa Cohen's vibrant art is an uplifting
celebration of life, peace, and music.
Transcircularities: New and
Selected Poems, Vol. 1
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More Views Hardcover - 1ST
ISBN: 156689137X
Pub. Date: October 2002
Format: Hardcover, 300pp
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Much like the vibrant, riveting reading performances for which he is well
known, Quincy Troupe's poetry is pure rhythm and deep bass beats that barely
stay on the page. This magnificent new volume captures Troupe's voice stronger
than ever as he issues celebratory and pointed statements on jazz, sports, love,
art, literature, American life, and the sublimity of it all.
Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems 1969-1977
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by Quincy Troupe
ISBN: 0918408113
Pub. Date: January 1979
Format: Paperback, 79pp
Publisher: Ishmael Reed
Publishing Company