Written By: Olivia J. B. Baxter

Editor’s Note: Here we are at the end of 2016. I am sitting here working on my computer while listening to James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” as a book on tape. I wrote a poem about being so tired that I couldn’t read Baldwin, but of of course, like him, I have a morbidly effervescent determination to find a way around my exasperation. I have over 200 books stacked up in my small apartment in Downtown Baltimore. “Discovering Your Past Lives: The Best Book on Reincarnation You’ll Ever Read…In This Lifetime!” jumped out at me as I am currently doing research for my second book, “The Warmest Low and Other Essays & Poems” which is a surrealist love story and collection of writings about reincarnation, karma and relationships.

Anyway, my new friend Olivia wrote a list of the Best Books of 2016 for Publik / Private. We met at a reading in Philadelphia a few weeks ago and immediately recognized that we had a lot in common. After hearing each other read excepts from our own upcoming books, we walked over to one another, noted our literary similarities and exchanged information.  She and I are both autodidacts, feminist women of color and have a deep love and affinity for the written word. I am so thankful to have met her and that she was able to volunteer to write this list. If you want to get ahold of her, email us at info@publikprivate.org. Happy New Year! -je

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Into the Light- Aleatha Romig  

Into the Light prompts an examination of the Duality of light and dark. This psychological thriller accentuates human motive and underlines inter-connectivity as we follow two women protagonists existing in different environments having disparate experiences. A prodigious mind f*ck. Continue reading →

By Publik / Private Team:

Publik / Private is accepting warm blankets and clothes in the downtown Baltimore City area. We’re moving into our coldest months and we’re working hard to get warm clothes, socks, hats and blankets to the homeless. For drop off points please email us at info@publikprivate.org. Please cc founder, Jordannah Elizabeth: jewriting@outlook.com

• Blankets
• Winter/knitted hats
• Sweaters
• Warm, thick socks
• Unopened boxes of sanitary products

Please contact info@publikprivate.org before donating clothing or financial contributions. We hold a fiscal sponsorship 501c3 through Independent Arts and Media.

Written By: Jordannah Elizabeth

“Willing Scapegoats for the Male Ego”

I’m so sick and tired I don’t want to read

Baldwin.

I’m so sick and tired I don’t want to read

James Baldwin.

Wake up. Wake up.

To be at this point,

surrounded by systems, white women

sexual threat, secret white guilt.

Buried tears too prideful to say,

“I’m racist. I was wrong.”

Misogynoir.

Continue reading →

Written By: Jordannah Elizabeth

Yes, Coretta Scott King was a Feminist.

(This piece is very simple with no bells or whistles. It is geared towards heterosexual women. We’ll have LGTBQ voices speak here and in other outlets I contribute to very soon. I love you all. And I love American men, but we really need to get real.)

I am pretty used to men’s drama. I’ve been told I am “too pretty” (to do pretty much anything intellectual), I’ve been called names, fired after not adhering to sexual advances, overheard the most lewd sexual jokes in office environments, and of course, I’ve been working in our culture’s male dominated music industry for over a decade. The patriarchy is a minefield I’ve learned to navigate as a professional and as a female identified human being.

Trump is a human manifestation of an unchecked pattern of male privilege induced by self hatred, insecurity and capitalistic manipulation. Trump says what he needs to say to manipulate sexist men and self hating white women. Trump hates women. Trump wants popularity and power, Trump is an American man (respect to all the complex, thoughtful men who don’t subscribe to traditional masculine stereotypes).

I believe influential American Black men have indirectly played into Trump’s persona and triumph by having artists like Lil’ Wayne, A$AP Rocky and others denounce Black Lives Matters while rapping about sexual exploitation and treating women horribly in their personal lives. Kanye West spent millions of dollars to make a life sized naked body double of Trump to sleep in bed with him and his wife…it looked like an endorsement to me. American men are taught to hate and objectify women and prioritize money and material goods over us and our children. It is how it is. Continue reading →

Written by: Paul Haney

Since it was announced that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, there has been no shortage of Bob Dylan commentators, theorists, critics, praise-givers and waxers philosophical, and no shortage of backlash against them. One might wonder if any of this commentary is necessary, or if it’s picking apart something that needn’t be touched, or if these would-be scholars even have anything valuable to say.

I don’t really know much of anything about Bob Dylan’s life or his music – I seem to have missed that train. But my good buddy Paul Haney knows quite a bit about both, and the insightfulness to pick apart some of the points of tension in opening up a new door in music (and literary) criticism. Check out more of his series on Bob Dylan’s albums on Instagram. – Michael Martino Continue reading →

Written By: Kaila Philo

Photo Credit: Max Goldberg

What a year for mental health, eh?

This year trigger warnings have come under fire for, for lack of better phrasing, shielding university students from troubling topics and, thus, hindering their education.

Triggers are subjects, themes, pictures, videos, etc, that may elicit panic attacks or other terrible mental/physical consequences that are direct results of past traumas. Trigger warnings are defined by dictionary.com as “stated warnings that the content of a text, video, etc., may upset or offend some people, especially those who have previously experienced a related trauma”. Trigger warnings began as a tool for Tumblr users to feel more comfortable navigating discourse around the Internet. The purpose of these warnings is to give trauma survivors some sort of choice in what they’re exposed to; they allow them the space and time to brace themselves for the impact of what’s to come or avoid them altogether.

There have been a cavalcade of thinkpieces about trigger warnings in the past few years—including Jonathan Chait’s highly-circulated “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say” for New York Magazine and the University of Chicago publicly denouncing trigger warnings in a letter to incoming freshmen—and most pundits have taken one of two sides: Yes, trigger warnings are necessary for students with traumatic pasts or no, trigger warnings are an insult to their intelligence. Somehow.

Sexual assault has also been a widely and oft debated topic lately, from the Nate Parker’s accusation (and subsequent foolish ramblings excusing himself for it) to the seemingly neverending Brock Turner mishandling. 2016 has become a year rife with discourse surrounding rape culture, for better or for worse considering this discourse has been spotty at best. So, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume that sexual assault survivors are going through a difficult time seeing as they’re forced to relive their own violent experiences in order to address current events or even turn on the news these days.

This wasn’t helped by the deplorable Donald Trump, who’s dominated headlines since he announced his presidential candidacy. This week the #TrumpTapes hit the internet and began circulating at rapid speed due to one reason: He talks about how easy it is for him to sexually harass and assault women. He infamously describes how he gets to grab women “by the p***y”, among other things, and later describes this discussion with Today Show host Billy Bush as “locker-room talk”.

Ironically, this isn’t the first, nor the most offensive, statement from Trump that’s surfaced during his bid for the presidency. He’s had a history of bigotry, spanning all the way back to the ‘80s and ‘90s when he declared that “Laziness is a trait in blacks”. He even incorporated that bigotry into his political campaign by proposing that he will build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, blaming “illegal aliens” for most of America’s woes in the process and calling them “rapists and murderers” in the process, and calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration, which racializes Islam whether he understands it or not. This all came to an absurd head right before the October 9th debate in St. Louis when Trump attempted to counter the #TrumpTapes by holding a press conference with the women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. Continue reading →

By: Jordannah Elizabeth

I am a direct result of child inclusiveness in the arts. I would like for us to consider others & create rights for children to hold space in every part of the world and in every situation.

Photo By: Shannon Wallace, Blacks and Blues.com

Children are the replaced, polished planks of our mistake’s wooden floors and the portals of truth and forgiveness behind our regret’s wooden doors. We must include them in our personal manifestos, in our acute artistic realities and in our day to day longings. We have been given the responsibility to feed and build literal futures.

In our current arts communities, we are creating, if not influencing an ingrained pattern of separation and a lack of expressive fortitude that could certainly be provided and developed in the early years of children’s lives by being given the opportunity to hold space inclusive artistic realms.

Does a child have rights to hold space even though they cannot express it? Does a child deserve culture, music, sound and art even though their frontal lobes don’t become fully developed until until age 25? Is the experience of witnessing social diplomacy between the artists, or hearing the eclectic tonal chaos of improvised music a revolutionary opportunity that may mold a child’s ability to discover and enact the freedom of experiential liberation? Continue reading →

Written By: Jordannah Elizabeth

Photo By: Shannon Wallace, http://www.blacksandblues.com

I haven’t been sleeping, but my skin is clean.

I looked in the mirror this morning and noticed that my eyes have been a tint of red for the past few days. I am notorious (only to myself) for not looking in the mirror. I shower, get dressed and dash out the door without much of a thought to my appearance. I just try to be clean, which I feel that is enough as I am not interested in being a beauty queen.

I was up worrying about Black people. The news hit late last night about Alton Sterling´s assassination by Baton Rouge Police. Trigger happy, gun hungry mentally ill men can join the police force to feed their their sick sadistic, murderous hungers. All those movies and documentaries about serial killers talk about how these people have a ¨hunger¨, a yearning and a need to torture and kill their fellow man. Why don´t we make tv shows and videos about twisted cops?

Not dirty cops – not corrupt cops, mentally ill, American Psycho Cops. Continue reading →