In the first chapter of Bluestown - which as a short story appeared in the 1995 Drue Heinz Prize-winning collection Dangerous Men - Geoffrey Becker emerges as a writer of unusual imagination and talent. Spencer Markus at fifteen wants to believe in his dad, Spider, a local musician whose life and career seem to be going nowhere. So when his dad shows up and pulls Spencer from school one afternoon, inviting him on a road trip, he is eager to go along. But the trip turns out to be Spider's strange way of saying good-bye, rather than facing up to the lies he's told, both to his son and to himself. Seven years later, Spencer is living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and a roommate, and working in Manhattan answering letters for Mutronics, a musical-effects company under siege from both its unhappy customers and a union that wants to organize it. In the midst of an imminent breakup with his girlfriend, and with the labor dispute growing uglier and more violent daily, Spencer suddenly hears from his father. As they try to reestablish some kind of relationship, Spencer must once again confront Spider's essentially unreliable nature, recognize that they may have more in common than he'd care to admit, and get on with his own life.

About this Piano Solo Blues Town is an original intermediate level piano solo composed by Michelle Ayler. Audio Preview To listen to an mp3 recording of this sheet music, please use the following link: http://goo.gl/XlnUSP Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Problems? Please contact MEA Music.

Offers insights on Latino Caribbean writers born or raised in the United States who are at the vanguard of a literary movement that has captured both critical and popular interest. In this groundbreaking study, William Luis analyzes the most salient and representative narrative and poetic works of the newest literary movement to emerge in Spanish American and U.S. literatures. The book is divided into three sections, each focused on representative Puerto Rican American, Cuban American, and Dominican American authors. Luis traces the writers' origins and influences from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on the contemporary works of Oscar Hijuelos, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, and Piri Thomas, among others. While engaging in close readings of the texts, Luis places them in a broader social, historical, political, and racial perspective to expose the tension between text and context. As a group, Latino Caribbeans write an ethnic literature in English that is born of their struggle to forge an identity separate from both the influences of their parents' culture and those of the United States. For these writers, their parents' country of origin is a distant memory. They have developed a culture of resistance and a language that mediates between their parents' identity and the culture that they themselves live in. Latino Caribbeans are engaged in a metaphorical dance with Anglo Americans as the dominant culture. Just as that dance represents a coming together of separate influences to make a unique art form, so do both Hispanic and North American cultures combine to bring a new literature into being. This new body of literature helps us to understand not only the adjustments Latino Caribbean cultures have had to make within the larger U.S. environment but also how the dominant culture has been affected by their presence.

In this third collection of verse, Esteves takes all of the rhythmic, bluesy potential and the women's poetic militancy of previous works and brings them to full, resplendent, funky bloom, blending the oral and literary traditions in a fusion of spiritual, blues and women's poetics.

Book 2 continues with 6ths, 7ths and octaves; eighth notes, dotted quarter notes and syncopated notes; sharps, flats and naturals; the keys of C, G and F Major; construction of the major scale, new 'fingered' chords and additional 'single-fingered' chords.

Among students and aficionados of contemporary literature, the work of Latina and Latino poets holds a particular fascination. Through works imbued with fire and passion, these writers have kindled new enthusiasm in their compatriots and admiration in non-Latino readers. This book brings together recent interviews with fifteen Latino/a poets, a cross-section of Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban voices who discuss not only their work but also related issues that help define their place in American literature. Each talks at length about the craft of his or her poetry—both the influences and the process behind it—and takes a stand on social and political issues affecting Latinos across the United States. The interviews feature both established writers published as early as the 1960s and emerging artists, each of whom has enjoyed success in other literary forms also. As Bruce Dick's insightful questions reveal, the key threads linking these writers are their connections to their families and communities and their concern for civil rights—believing like Chicana writer Pat Mora that "the work of the poet is for the people." The interviews also reveal diversity among and within the three communities, from Victor Hernández Cruz, who traces Latino collective identity to Africa and claims that all Latinos are "swimming in olive oil," to Cuban writer Gustavo Perez Firmat, who considers nationality more important than ethnicity and says that "the term Latino erases [his] nationality." The dialogues also offer new insights on the place of Chicano/a writings in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, on the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican establishment, and on the anti-Castro stand of Cuban-born poets. As these writers answer questions about their work, background, ethnic identity, and political ideology, they provide a wealth of biographical, intellectual, and literary material collected here for the first time. A Poet's Truth is a provocative and revealing book that not only conveys the fire of these writers' passions but also sheds important light on a whole literary movement. Interviews with: Miguel Algarín Martín Espada Sandra María Esteves Victor Hernández Cruz Carolina Hospital and Carlos Medina Demetria Martínez Pat Mora Judith Ortiz Cofer Ricardo Pau-Llosa Gustavo Pérez Firmat Leroy Quintana Aleida Rodríguez Luis Rodríguez Benjamin Alire Sáenz Virgil Suárez