Have Your Say (Part 2): Worth a Thousand Words

All artists, writers included, are inspired to one degree or another by the life taking place all around them. Zora Neale Hurston and writers of the Harlem Renaissance (known at the time as the “New Negro Movement”) paid attention to many dimensions of life and based their work on what they saw and felt. They, in other words, allowed culture to serve as their muse.

With this in mind, we've put together a Power Point presentation called "Drop Me Off In Harlem," named after a once-popular jazz tune written by Duke Ellington and Nick Kenny. Our presentation features images drawn from the New Negro Movement/Harlem Renaissance. We'd like for you to study the images, and then select one that you like best. Try not only to explain what you see happening within the frame, but imagine and create a scene or story based on what it brings to mind and makes you feel.

Write no more than one thousand words, roughly three pages. Post an excerpt of about 250 words from your essay/creative response as a comment beneath this blog entry. Also, be sure to include your e-mail address. The first ten posts will be automatically win a Harlem Renaissance-related book or Learning and Tutoring Center gear such as book bags and umbrellas.

Keep in mind that we are not judging essays, as such. We just want you to flex the muscles of your imagination.

Have fun and good luck!

Above image of three flappers strolling on Seventh Avenue taken by unknown photographer

Book Picks for 2010 African American Read In

Stumped about what to buy or check out for the upcoming African-American Read In? Here is a quick list of suggestions (click on the book titles for descriptions):

Abouet, Marguerite and Clement Oubrerie/Aya of Yop City

Baszile, Jennifer/The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir

Brice, Carleen/Orange Mint and Honey

Carson, Ben/Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose and Live with Acceptable Risk

Chisolm, Shirley/Unbought and Unbossed

Coates, Ta-Nehisi/The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

Conde, Maryse/Segu

Davis, Ossie and Ruby Dee/With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together

Ellis, Normandi/Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Gray, Farrah/Reallionaire: Nine Steps to Becoming Rich from the Inside Out

Lee, Spike/Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems

Luckett, Jacqueline/Searching for Tina Turner

Nunez, Elizabeth/Anna In Between

Perkins-Valdez, Dolen/Wench: A Novel

Pitts, Byron/Step Out on Nothing: How Faith and Family Helped Me Conquer Life's Challenges

Powell, Kevin/The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life

Senna, Danzy/Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History

Skloot, Rebecca/The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Somé, Sobonfu/Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community

Whitehead, Colson/Sag Harbor

Still don't see anything of interest? Click here for a longer book list to browse.

Have Your Say (Part 1): Quotable Zora

Zora Neale Hurston appreciated plain-spoken wisdom. Sometimes the source of this wisdom was her personal observation and reasoning. Other times it was adapted from the mouths of the everyday people to whom she felt deeply connected.

Hurston was like a geologist and gem cutter rolled into one. Much of her creative energy was spent extracting the precious material of folk speech and philosophy and then carefully cutting away so that light and beauty shined through.

As true as this is, a careful reading will reveal that Hurston was concerned with far more than lyricism or dazzling her readers with pretty words. She wanted her work to say something and speak truth. “It’s no use talking,” she once said, “unless people understand what you say.”

In honor of Black History Month, we’ve gone hunting for more from Hurston. Here’s what we found:

• Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
  
• The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
  
• There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
  
• I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy…[a] whole slew of dime novels in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing.
  
• She didn’t read books, so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.
  
• Merely being a good man is not enough to hold a Negro preacher in an important charge. He must also be an artist. He must be both a poet and an actor of a very high order. Negro preachers…are…artists, the ones intelligible to the masses. A voice has told them to sing of the beginnings of things.
  
• Laugh if you will, but that man in the gutter is the god-maker, the creator of everything that lasts.
  
• Once you wake up thought in a man, you can never put it to sleep.
  
• Faith hasn’t got no eyes, but she’s long legged.
  
• I’ve been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountains, wrapped in rainbows with a harp and sword in my hands.
  

We want to hear from students: which quote is your favorite, and what do you read into it? When you post your reply be sure to include the whole Zora quote somewhere in the body. If you select one of the longer quotes then feel free to condense. We’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

French Films at Clarkston Campus

Enjoy a first-class vacation without leaving Atlanta!

Georgia Perimeter College will host the 2010 CERCLE FRANCOPHONE MARDI GRAS FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL beginning Monday, Feb. 15 through Friday, Feb .19 on the Clarkston Campus in the Jim Cherry Learning Resource Center Auditorium, 555 North Indian Creek Drive, Clarkston.

This multicultural assortment of English-subtitled films include many Cannes Film Festival award-winners and Oscar-nominees. The screenings are free and open to the public. All films start at 5 p.m.





Monday, Feb. 15: La Vie en Rose is a film about the legendary French singer, Edith Piaf, and named after one of her most famous songs. It explores the bends and twists of Piaf's life, including her unstable childhood and her gradual climb to stardom.


Tuesday, Feb. 16: Entre Les Murs (The Class) Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by a French language and literature teacher, the story focuses on tension and eventual respect that develops between the main character and his students whose families have migrated from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.


Wednesday, Feb. 17: Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tree) is a dramatic tale of how a family navigates one loss after another and the messy business of life.


Thursday , Feb. 18: Reves de Poussiere (Dreams of Dust) set on the African continent, the alternate American title of this film is Buried Dreams. It tells the story of a Nigerian peasant who seeks to unburden himself of memories of the past by migrating to a gold-mining town in Burkina Faso.


Friday, Feb. 19: La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of Grain) centers on a Franco-Arabic family and their determination to adapt to life on the southern coast of France and in the process open a restaurant serving comfort food from their native country of Tunisia.


The event is sponsored by GPC Student Life, the Alliance Française d’Atlanta, the Consulat de France d’Atlanta and the GPC Center for International Education. For information contact Genette Ashby-Beach at 678-891-2385.

The Big Read Celebrates Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things
enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom were in the branches."

February is Black History Month. It is also the month of an annual event called the African American Read In, a National Council of Teachers of English-sponsored festival promoting literacy, heritage and imagination. For years, the Decatur campus LTC has rallied campus participation in this event, and this year is no different.

Overlapping the African American Read-In is another major literary event called The Big Read, a National Endowment for the Arts initiative "designed to restore reading to the center of American culture [and] encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment. " How it works is that a title is selected and everyone within a particular community agrees to read and discuss it.

This year's pick for Atlanta is Zora Neale Hurston's classic love story, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The Atlanta History Center will be hosting its Big Read kick off on February 17 with a free Harlem Renaissance themed party, complete with music and a photographic exhibition titled Let Your Motto Be Resistance. AHC has also planned a host of festivities stretching throughout February and March.

Stay tuned as our Learning and Tutoring Center announces its own line up of events celebrating the African American Read In and Atlanta's Big Read.

Of course, be sure to check out Their Eyes from the campus or local library, buy it from a bookstore or order a copy online, and celebrate Black History Month by letting books like this one lift your imagination to greater heights!

Dr. Ben Carson and the Power of Reading

Physician, professor, author, motivational speaker and humanitarian Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson is a super star in the world of medicine. Holding degrees from Yale and the University of Michigan, he has headed the department of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Hospital since he was thirty-three years old. At the peak of his career Carson would perform more than five hundred surgeries a year-- far more than most brain surgeons take on. People travel great distances in the hope that he will be able to help their cases, ones which have often been written off as impossible. Families from the United States, Africa, Europe and the Middle East trust their children to him because of his development of innovative surgical techniques, including one that helped him become the first surgeon to successfully separate twins joined at the head.

With a resume like this, it would be easy to assume that Carson was groomed by educated parents or is following in the footsteps of a grandparent similar in stature to Daniel Hale Williams, Charles Drew or William Augustus

Hinton. Not so.

Journey with us on Thursday, January 28 as we retrace some of the steps in Dr. Carson’s inspirational odyssey through poverty, uncertainty and anger to personal victory during our screening of Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story. This recently-made dramatization of highlights of Carson’s life centers largely on the power that reading has to transform a life and stars Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Boyz N the Hood and Jerry McGuire) as Carson and Kimberly Elise (Great

Debaters and Beloved) as Carson’s determined mother,

Sonya.

As a segue to the film, Professor Shawn L. Williams will read highlights from "The Power of Reading" chapter in Carson’s motivational memoir, Think Big.

The program will start at 11 a.m. and run until 1 p.m.

Welcome

We’re looking forward to exploring ways to use the blogosphere to dynamically link our students’ voices with instructor curricula and the academic support that we offer in the LTC. There are so many exciting possibilities!

Please stay tuned as we gear up to bring you news about our programming line-up. In the meantime, we invite you to spend some time browsing our links (which will continue to expand along with the growth of this site).

We can’t wait to hear what you have to say.