American based writer Kola Boof will be presented with Sweden's 2007 World Author's Woman to Woman Pen during her September 16th reading at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The award is for her powerful essay "I Am My Own Daughter", which was published earlier this year in Sweden's top women's magazine, Ottar.
Swedish Link: http://www.rfsu.se/jag_ar_min_egen_dotter.asp
Ms. Boof's reading at the Schomburg Center will take place in the Langston Hughes Auditorium at 4 p.m. The Center (212-491-2257) is at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard. Admission is Free.
Though many who've never read the "glamorexic" author's works have unfairly dubbed her the "Diana Ross of the publishing business", Boof is a powerfully gifted and acclaimed literary stylist and social activist often despised for her candor.
Born Naima Bint Harith in Omdurman Sudan, Kola Boof was one of the first writers to alert America about the catastrophe that continues to unwind in that nation. The highest ranking woman in the SPLA despite the "sexism" of detractors within the group, Boof was an early advocate against the Biblically-proportioned plagues afflicting that once-beautiful country: genocide, starvation, rampant rape, and predation by modern-day slavers.
Boof, who describes herself as a womanist writer in the tradition of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Terry McMillan, has also been dubbed "the African Garbo" by the New York Times and will read from her collection of short fiction, "Long Train to the Redeeming Sin: Stories of African Women", her landmark book of poetry, "Nile River Woman", and her epic novel "Flesh and the Devil", all published by Door of Kush Press.
A new poem by Boof in honor of activist-writer Ward Churchill entitled "Indigenism: White Man/Bare Chest" will also be read. Boof says that Ward Churchill was totally wrong for his comments about the victims of 911, but that the University of Colorado is equally wrong for "persecuting" such an important artist.
By appearing at the Schomburg Center, the notoriously ambitious Kola Boof follows in the illustrious footsteps of Afro-American legends such as Marita Golden, Walter Mosley, Pearl Cleage, Eric Jerome Dickey, Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan, Amiri Baraka, Star Jones, Fantasia, Iyanla Vanzant, Tavis Smiley, bell hooks, Stephen Carter, Keith Boykin, Gloria Naylor, Tiki Barber, Lauryn Hill and Jasmyne Cannick.
The program starts at 4 p.m.