"URBAN IMPROVISATIONS"

Urban Improvisations;
alternative perspectives on the African American Experiences

Short Stories, Essays and Poetry

How do black men and women achieve intimacy in the club life? Can a vibrant, attractive black woman on the "plus" side find self-actualization? What does a line dance mean to black women when it is exploited to extreme limits?

What does love between a Black man and a Black woman mean in postmodern America? How does a black man express affection to a black woman in a society that views all that is distinctly African American as passé – all but the commercial use of the word "Nigger"?

What does interracial relationship mean to lovers in competitive corporate America? What does the love of the ancestors mean to a drug addict?What mark does the history of sexual exploitation on leave on a young black couple seeking their own private little niche?

These are the questions our writingexplores. We write from the unique prospective of the social worker. Our profession requires us to intimately engage the struggles of men, women and children to overcome personal histories of abuse and neglect. Our fiction springs from our experiences of becoming one with the persons who still suffer under the legacy the middle passage to America.

The most compelling story of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century is the evolution of a race that was given birth in the bottom of slave ships. In that terrible birth canal a wwhittling down of human beings occurred between those who will perish as Africans from those who will forever be known as nigger, Negro, coloreds, blacks, African Americans, Afro Americans and post racial "N words".

Our fore parents were sustained and indeed flourished from their tenacious grip to their humanity as their world was inexorably and cruelly transformed around them. A resilient, relentless humanity expressed in improvisation is their legacy. That legacy of not only "making it up as you go along" but making it better is celebrated in these fiction offerings.

As the twenty-first century unfolds it has become clearthat forces that would subjugate our fore parents persist. That, "the more things change, the more things stay the same."The coinage of pain for expediency sake is the realities that confront people of color and poor people today. But it is hoped that these humble fiction offerings will invoke the legacy of invention handed down to us as we struggle to triumph over our own private middle passages.