Friday February 17, 8 PM Doors, show at 9 PM sharp - $5 Cover – BYOB

The Weekly Revue Variety Show!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the lion may rut and roar but his mightiness still pales in comparison to The Mightiness’s Weekly Revue!  With a lineup from our dreamscape invading your worldview we are proud to present three heroic acts held together by the ravings of your host and personal Rabbi – Toby Lou, the nasty one.  Featuring performances by Jascha Ephraim – acclaimed musician, singer, composer, life changer, and one of our youthful inspirations! Sam Geller as Samson the Truest – golden haired goldenboy and hardbody ripping his own heart out live in song and wail! And the Philadelphia Premiere of People Parade, genius and hilarious short film straight from Slamdance 2011, screening at the Weekly Revue to incite and inspire! Be with us and benefit! BYOB, and BYOBest companions! Blessings for the blessed!

Wednesday February 15, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Alondra Nelson author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination ($24.95 University of Minnesota Press)

The legacy of the Black Panther Party’s commitment to community health care, a central aspect of its fight for social justice

Alondra Nelson recovers a lesser-known aspect of The Black Panther Party’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was practical and ideological and that their understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race.

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.

Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.

The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy—and that struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.

Alondra Nelson is associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is coeditor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life and Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision between DNA, Race, and History.

In Body and Soul, Alondra Nelson combines careful research, deep political insight, and passionate commitment to tell the little-known story of the Black Panther Party’s health activism in the late 1960s. In doing so, and in showing how the problems of poverty, discrimination, and access to medical care remain hauntingly similar more than forty years later, Nelson reminds us that the struggle continues, particularly for African Americans, and that social policies have profound moral implications. — Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This book is a revelation. Alondra Nelson uncovers two remarkable histories in Body and Soul. First, she provides the deep context for our current conversation about the health disparities that plague the African-American community and that are, as she puts it, ‘quite literally sickening.’ Second, she adds immeasurably to our knowledge of the Black Panther Party, complicating its commonplace designation as a radical, militant organization to unearth its dedication and hard work in advocating for and providing equal and quality health care for even the most underserved African Americans. Nelson is the first scholar I know of to bring these two histories into dialogue with each other, and she does so with spectacular results. This is a tremendously important book. —Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

The activities of the Black Panther Party have long been reduced to stories of violent police confrontations and empty propaganda. By taking seriously the claims and the practices of the Black Panthers with respect to the health of Black people, Alondra Nelson has provided a critical corrective to earlier studies. More importantly, this is a brilliant analysis of a significant moment in the long tradition of health advocacy on the part of African Americans. Body and Soul is a major achievement. — Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard University

Tuesday February 28, 7pm – Poetry

Anne Waldman author of The Iovis Trilogy – Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment ($40.00 coffee House Press)

Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem assures Anne Waldman’s place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry.

The Iovis Trilogy, Waldman’s monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman’s themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction “to include history”—its effort is to change history.

“Begun in the 1980s, this mammoth work may be the summit of [Waldman’s] career and . . . an attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake’s epics and Pound’s cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization that we have known. . . . A book to admire, to pay homage to, to get lost in, Waldman’s epic goes splendidly on and on, mixing the shamanistic with the diaristic, the topical with the prayerful, incorporating almost everything . . . ”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This Virgilian epic song, a vast written performance that must be acknowledged for its “orality of intention,” is an expression of knowledge—embodied and disembodied, material and transcendental, violent and pacifist, visionary and starkly realist, present and transhistorical. To read it, to move across its many pages, is to invite a demand for and a belief in freedom that is platonic and phonemic. The three books collected in The Iovis Trilogy . . . together show the force of Waldman’s galloping collection of forms as a vibration of knowledge through ceaseless experiment, a sensorium through which the roundness of self burrows in to win the furthest circumference.”—The Poetry Project Newsletter

“Waldman takes you by the collar and slams you down with language, image, and message, leaving you breathless and shattered in the aftermath of her incantatory vision. . . . The poems repeat themselves, wrap around themselves, glide through linguistic holes that only the poet herself could have seen. They trumpet, blare, and whisper vision upon vision of a world gone crazy with war and patriarchal mores, then proceed to share another vision, one of healing and peace. . . . This is a book of action, a poetic clarion call. Huge and weighty, it will be compared to The Cantos and Paterson. It is neither. It is Iovis; it is an act of incendiary love, and it stands alone.”—Powells.com

Monday February 27, 6:30 – Fiction Workshop

Philadelphia Stories Fiction Workshop

For more information, please email christine@philadelphiastories.org

Friday February 24, 8pm – $10 Cover -BYOB – Gypsy Jazz

The Belleville Quartet & Slowey and the Boats

The Belleville Quartet is a West Philadelphia based acoustic jazz ensemble.

Born and raised in Northeast PA, Matt Stein moved to Philadelphia in 2002 and has been an active bass player in the Philadelphia music community ever since. He graduated from Temple University’s Jazz Studies program in 2006 and has studied under a number of great bassists, including Tony Marino, Mike Boone, Madison Rast, Tyrone Brown, Ben Street, Drew Gress, and John Hood. He currently studies with the great musicologist Karl Berger.Matt has performed with many ensembles, including rock bands illuminea, The Book of Knots, and Hoots and Hellmouth, and more jazz oriented groups Racketshop (Dan Blacksberg/Nick Millevoi), Travis

Woodson’s Live Like a King, and the Belleville Quartet. He also leads his own group, which will be doing some tribute shows for the late great drummer, Paul Motian, in the spring of 2012

Slowey and the Boats

Slowey and the Slow Boats is a group of accomplished Philadelphia-based musicians who have gotten together to play the music they love.  Comprised of steel guitar, standard guitars, Wurlitzer, and bass the group’s sound is unexpected yet familiar.

Thursday February 23, 5:30pm – Workshop

The Life of The Poet Workshop with Leonard Gontarek

Thursday, 5:30 –7 PM. $64 for four sessions.

Contact: Leonard Gontarek -gontarek9@earthlink.net

Tuesday February 21, 7pm

Poets & Prophets Presents

Kimmika L. H, Williams-Witherspoon

Professor, Poet, Playwright, Lecturer, Director, and performance Artist. She holds a Ph.D (Anthropology); MA (Anthropology); MFA (Theater); Graduate Certificate (Women’s Studies); B.A. (Journalism); Kimmika is a two-time recipient of the Future Faculty Fellowship, at Temple University; and is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater History in the Theater Department at Temple University.

Winner of the PEW Charitable Trusts Fellowship in the Arts for Scriptwriting(2000); the 1999, winner of the DaimlerChrysler “Spirit of the Word” National Poetry Competition at Seattle, Washington’s Unity’99 Conference and the DaimlerChrysler Regional Poetry Contest for Philadelphia, the 1996, Lila Wallace Creative Arts Fellowship with the American Antiquarian Society and Dr. Williams-Witherspoon is also a two-time returning playwright with the Minneapolis Playwrights’ Center and Pew Charitable Trusts Playwrights Exchange. A one time Arts Producer for public radio, she was also cited for outstanding journalism by the Philadelphia Veterans Administration. And she has stage credits. Williams is a contributing poet to several anthologies including Bum Rush the Page; Houston Poetry Fest Anthology, Houston Poetry Fest Anthology; Spirit of the Words: Moving Through Poetry etc. The author of eight books of poetry, her latest is They Never Told me there’d Be Days Like This. Williams is a recipient of numerous Residency, Teaching and Community Service Awards, including citations from City Council, The Goode Admin., the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the key to the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania by Mayor James P. Connors in 1992.
Her adventures as a Recording Artist include a new CD Spoken Word long with the ground-breaking cassette, DON’T CALL ME A BITCH, (1985) on the Mark Hyman Associates label. Up-coming projects include, the soon-to-be released short story collection, Never Alone: Tales from the ‘Hood. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, PH.D., is a contributing poet to several anthologies and is the author of seven volumes of poetry. She is recipient of numerous awards and honors, including: the Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in Screenwriting; the Daimler Chrysler “Spirit of the Word” National Poetry Competition; and the Lila Wallace Creative Arts Fellowship.

Monday February 20, 6:30 – Fiction Workshop

Philadelphia Stories Fiction Workshop

For more information, please email christine@philadelphiastories.org

Sunday February 19, 11am – Discussion

The Nation Magazine Discussion Group

Thursday February 16, 5:30pm – Workshop

The Life of The Poet Workshop with Leonard Gontarek

Thursday, 5:30 –7 PM. $64 for four sessions.

Contact: Leonard Gontarek -gontarek9@earthlink.net