VIDEO + AUDIO David Henderson, solo reading and in conversation

Full-program video: David Henderson: March 15, 2018
Video highlight clips: from "Keep On Pushing (Harlem Rebellion / Summer / 1964)" | "Song of Devotion to the Forest (for the Ituri Pygmies)" | from "Gil Scott-Heron," in tribute to his friend the late singer and writer

David Henderson makes a rare appearance back in San Francisco from his long-time home on New York’s Lower East Side, reading a retrospective of his poetry from his earliest book, Felix of the Silent Forest (Poets Press, 1967), to recent work from manuscript, then talking at length with the audience.

David Henderson was connected to the Black Arts Movement through the Umbra Workshop, where he served as an editor of their magazine and the three Umbra anthologies. His best-known books of poetry are De Mayor of Harlem (1970) and Neo-California (1998), and he has read a selection of his poetry for the permanent archives of the Library of Congress. Author of the lyrics to Sun Ra’s composition “Love in Outer Space” (and the singer), he has also recorded with the saxophonists and composers Ornette Coleman (“Science Fiction”) and David Murray, and the cornetist and composer Butch Morris. He is the author of ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Child (2009), and wrote and produced an award-winning two-hour documentary on the African American beat poet Bob Kaufman for National Public Radio and the Pacifica Foundation. Recent publications include prose and poetry in the anthologies Beats at Naropa (2009), Obama, Obama (2012), Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry (2013), and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (2014). A poet-in-residence at the City College of New York, he has taught in CUNY’s SEEK Program and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Diego, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Wesleyan University, Middleton, Connecticut. Most recently he became the first Fellow of Lost and Found, the Poetics Document Initiative at the Center for the Humanities, The City University of New York.