Askia Touré

Askia Touré was born Rolland Snellings in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a poet, community activist, lecturer, educator, and one of the pioneers of the Black Arts Movement. As a member of the SNCC, Touré participated in the Atlanta Project and co-authored the SNCC’s “Black Power Position Paper.” During the 1960s he was also a contributing editor for the magazine Black Dialogue, an editor-at-large for the Journal of Black Poetry, and a staff writer of Liberator Magazine and Soulbook. As an educator, Touré taught African history in San Francisco State University’s pioneering Africana Studies program. His volumes of verse include African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots (2007), Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Touré (1999), which was awarded the Stephen Henderson Poetry Award, From the Pyramid to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance (1989), a collection of poems for which he won the American Book Award, Songhai! (1972), and Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation (1970). His poems have been anthologized in Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004) and From Totems to Hip Hop: A Multi-Cultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002 (2002). In 1996, Touré was awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement Award. Touré has lived in Boston since 1997, where he is a member of the African-American Master Artists-in-Residence Program at Northeastern University. He is working on an independent film based on his play, “Double Dutch: A Gathering of Women,” as well as a libretto based on his poem, “From the Pyramids to the Projects, From the Projects to the Stars.”