Articles By

Hakim Bellamy

Michael Datcher takes ABQ on a distinct ‘trip down memory lane’ this Saturday at the Outpost

Sometimes nonfiction is just not quite creative enough. Not even creative nonfiction. “With fiction, my goal is to remind people about the vitality of fiction. In our world people prefer nonfiction,” says Loyola Marymount Professor and New York Times Bestselling author Michael Datcher. “Because it is made up material people don’t respect it as a way to talk about the real world. They don’t look at it as a way to learn something about the real world, as opposed to a book of theory…people want to be entertained, rather than learn something about the past or themselves.”

This Saturday, Datcher is bringing his newest work to Albuquerque thanks to 516 ARTS and Outpost Performance Space. AMERICUS is a uniquely American story swaddled in Egyptian mythology and set in East Louis circa 1917…

Weekly Poem: Hot Tub Time Machine

There’s a place
just beyond the present,
where the past goes to die
in the name of progress.

Where prayers
become quaint folks songs,
instead of blueprints,
instead of sheet music to the revolution,
instead of the past words
to our next donut round the sun…

One Million Bones on ¡Colores! particularly timely

My most striking memories of being on the National Mall for the One Million Bones installation are of the conversations I overheard. Families of four would stop and look. One of the younger family members would ask, “What’s that?” One of the older family members would pause for approximately a moment of silence. Then, I’d listen as the adult gracelessly tries to choreograph an explanation as to why there is a mass grave in front of the United States Capitol without stepping on the word “genocide"…

Two Hak-Ku*

This first haiku is for a forthcoming book of haiku, I am publishing. However, current events have recently made this short poem very popular and very potent. Thank you to poet and friend Susana Rinderle and organizer, childhood friend and mother Tangi Lancaster for asking to use this poem as their mantra to grieve and get something that at least resembles justice in the Trayvon Martin case. The haiku that follows Black Poem for America is brand new, and titled Only in America…

Youth “Voces” on display this Friday

Every Monday through Friday for the month of June, from 9am to 4pm, a group of teenagers have devoted themselves to the art of being heard. These teen authors have bought into a 12 year-old program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center called Voces. This teen summer writing intensive was facilitated by the multimedia hip hop theater collaborative Urban Verbs, under the direction of Hakim Bellamy, Carlos Contreras and Colin Diles Hazelbaker. Throughout the month these young writers, with interest that vary from poetry to music to politics to comedy to short stories, were given the freedom and form to develop their innate writing talent. Guest presenters were brought in as experts on different styles of writing and performance, as well as visual art, choreography and communications/media training…

Weekly Poetry: Officer Smith

What I wish I would have said to the soldier this morning as we stared each other down for a three second eternity in the *Smith’s parking lot (AKA “Officer Smith” poem)

I wonder
if this is what it feels like
standing on the other end
of your rifle
or are your eyes always that big
and soft
would you take offense?
if I said
that you are the only part
of that uniform
that makes me proud to be an American…