Photo: Lynda Koolish,
African American Writers:
Portraits and Visions
Quincy Troupe is the author of 18 (as of 2013) books, including 8 volumes of poetry, the latest of which is the Architecture of Language. He also co-authored The Pursuit of Happiness by Chris Gardner, a major motion picture staring Will Smith. Troupe received the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award for Trancircularities: New and Selected Poems, selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry written in 2002. Currently Mr. Troupe is writing an auto-memoir. The Accordion Years:1965 to 2005.
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.
Troupe Discusses his books The Pursuit of
Happyness and Miles and Me. Credit: AALBC.com
Earl
The Pearl: My Story
Click to order via Amazon
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Rodale Books (April 23, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1609615611
ISBN-13: 978-1609615611
Earl “The Pearl” Monroe is a basketball legend whose impact on
the game transcends statistics, a player known as much for his
unorthodox, “playground” style of play as his championship
pedigree. Observers said that watching him play was like
listening to jazz, his moves resembling freefloating
improvisations. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the
ball,” Monroe once admitted, “and if I don’t know, I’m quite
sure the guy guarding me doesn’t know either.”
Traded to the New York Knicks before the 1971-72 season, Monroe
became a key member of the beloved, star-studded 1972-73 Knicks
team that captured the NBA title. And now, on the 40th
anniversary of that championship season—the franchise’s
last—Monroe is finally ready to tell his remarkable story.
Written with bestselling author Quincy Troupe (Miles, The
Pursuit of Happyness) Earl the Pearl will retrace Monroe’s life
from his upbringing in a tough South Philadelphia neighborhood
through his record-setting days at Winston-Salem State, to his
NBA Rookie of the Year season in 1967, his tremendous years with
the Baltimore Bullets and ultimately his redemptive,
championship glory with the New York Knicks. The book will
culminate with a revealing epilogue in which Monroe reflects on
the events of the past 40 years, offers his insights into the
NBA today, and his thoughts on the future of the game he loves.
EARL MONROE is one of the greatest and most beloved players in
basketball history. Inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall
of Fame in 1990 and named to the NBA’s 50 Greatest Players list
in 1996, Monroe left an indelible stylistic mark on the game of
basketball. He lives in New York City.
Errancities
Click to order via Amazon
Hardcover: 140 pages
Publisher: Coffee House Press (February 14, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 156689283X
ISBN-13: 978-1566892834
Award-winning poet, Hollywood author, and Miles Davis
confidante, Quincy Troupe evokes a sheer love of invention.
Coined with the French word errance ("to wander") in mind, these
poems rove from ancient Yoruba to the streets of Harlem to the
tropical heat of Guadeloupe and emerge with a new vocabulary for
the transformations of the physical, philosophical, and musical
worlds. Known for his long, lyrical narrative poems and
invocation of the oral tradition, Troupe captures the histories
and deaths of Michael Jackson and Miles Davis, celebrating both
their accomplishments and contradictions. This collection
embraces the improvisation of a soul as it offers a paean to the
possibilities of poetry.
The Pursuit of Happyness
Click to order via Amazon
by Chris Gardner, Quincy Troupe, Mim Eichler Rivas
ISBN: 0060744863
Pub. Date: May 2006
Format: Hardcover, 320pp
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Read an AALBC.com Movie Review
New York Times bestseller for 40 weeks!
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
Click to order via Amazon
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
Click to order via Amazon
Format: Hardcover, 256pp.
Publisher: University of California Press
Pub. Date: March 2000
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
Click to order via Amazon
by Miles Davis, with Quincy Troupe
ISBN: 0671725823
Pub. Date: January 1990
Format: Paperback, 448pp
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
WinnerAmerican Book Award.
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
Click to order via Amazon
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
Click to order via Amazon
(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
Click to order via Amazon
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
Click to order via Amazon
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.
Weather
Reports: New and Selected Poems
Click to order via Amazon
Paperback: 177 pages
Publisher: Writers & Readers (November 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0863161081
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems 1969-1977
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0918408113
Pub. Date: January 1979
Format: Paperback, 79pp
Publisher: Ishmael Reed
Publishing Company
WinnerAmerican Book Award.
