Dear Readers,

Please join us as we acknowledge and celebrate the work of lifelong “saying it how she wants it to be said” poet, Laini Mataka, whose works we have had the honor of publishing since 1989 beginning with Never As Strangers.  Respectfully called the queen, Laini is anything but anonymous. Currently living in Washington, D.C., Mataka uses print and spoken word to share the recipe for good Black thinking and doing.  As one of many testaments to her body of work, she was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at Chicago State in 2009.

Of her latest published collection, The Prince of Kokomo, BCP Director, W. Paul Coates writes:

When you read The Prince of Kokomo, be armed to follow Mataka into battle. Do not hesitate. She is Harriet restored. And now, just as then, she has no time for those who love the comfort of their prisons, or the seductions of their enslavement.

Below is Mataka’s poem, “keepin it real”, from Kokomo, see if you agree with Coates.