![Black Portraiture[s]](https://www.blackportraitures.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Black_Portraitures_Logo_full_color_light_type-2.svg){kind=logo}
What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Cheryl Clarke
Cheryl Clarke’s writing has appeared in numerous publications since 1979, including the iconic feminist collections This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (1982) and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). She is the author of five books of poetry, Narratives: poems in the tradition of black women (1982; digitized, 2014); Living as a Lesbian (1986, reprinted 2014), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), and By My Precise Haircut (2016). In 2012, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (N.Y.) presented her with the David Kessler Award for her contributions to LGBT communities. She retired in 2013 from Rutgers University, after 41 years. She is a founder and an-organizer of the annual Hobart (NY) Festival of Women Writers. Visit: www.cherylclarkepoet.com
Poet