A Tribute to Jayne Cortez — Robin D.G. Kelley with Justin Desmangles: November 14, 2013

Robin D. G. Kelley, in conversation with Justin Desmangles, speaks of Jayne Cortez and her work, including remarks on Cortez's role as a poet, her use of the blues as expression and assertion of sexuality, a celebration of the erotic, her work with music, and as critique. They discuss the ways her storytelling makes the violence against human bodies analogous to the violence against nature, her ideas of history, ancestors and surrealism, the medicinal or healing aspects of her poetry, and her use of humor and satire as a technique towards revolutionary struggle.

They speak of writers and other artists with whom Cortez's work finds affinities, including Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Ted Joans, Richard Pryor, among others including scultptor/artist Melvin Edwards, to whom Cortez was married, and the members of her longstanding musical group The Firespitters. 

Kelley, in addition to presenting a video showing Cortez's last public performance, in New York City with piano giant Randy Weston, reads from Cortez's poems: "In the Morning," "Now I Dig Up Patinas," "Give Me the Red on the Black of the Bullet (For Claude Reece Jr.)," and "Global Inequalities."

Robin D. G. Kelley and Justin Desmangles take questions from the audience and in their responses address various subjects in relation to Jayne Cortez and her work. Among these are comedy, music and musician-poet collaborations, the recent film Twelve Years a Slave, structural racism, slavery, freedom, Cortez's expression of modernity, and her use of the pronoun "I."