Goodbye Langston

About the Book

Goodbye Langston is a tribute to Langston Hughes, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way it celebrates Miles Davis, Lena Horne, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr, Billie Holiday and more. This book says goodbye a poet who I feel was never properly honored when he lived. This Is my personal and private goodbye.

About the Author

In 1996, I was thirty years of age and I didn’t want to live. Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks was 79 and didn’t want to die. She wrote me three times between 1996 and 1998. Her first two letters were mostly about poetry. But her final letter was different and more personal. It was not about similes or metaphors. It was not about style or meter. It was about life and closure. I tried to decipher a three page letter she mailed to me, but I was too immersed in my own complicated life to realize what she might have been expressing. I could not effectively read between the lines. Gwen was saying goodbye to me and to the world. Soon there would be no more letters from Gwen. Not to me. Not to anyone. A few years later I read she had passed away. I will take to my grave most of the thoughts she shared. Gwendolyn was trying to pass a baton of legacy to a new generation of poets. In 2010, I reached out for it and started running. I am still running.