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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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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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

 

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