Abiodun Oyewole
"When we create, we are communicating with God. It is the God in us that allows us to create under any circumstance. Our creativity is limitless. There is the expression, 'Necessity is the mother of invention.' You can say that African American people are the mothers and fathers of creativity. We can take nothing and turn it into something of value."
ABIODUN OYEWOLE is a poet, teacher, and founding member of the American music and spoken-word group the Last Poets (1968), which laid the groundwork for the emergence of hip hop. He performed on the Last Poets’ albums, The Last Poets (1970), Holy Terror (1993), and The Time Has Come (1997). Oyewole received his BS in biology and BA in communications at Shaw University, an MA in education at Columbia University, and is a Columbia Charles H. Revson Fellow (1989). He rejoined The Last Poets during its 1990s resurgence, and co-authored with Umar Bin Hassan, On A Mission: Selected Poems and a History of the Last Poets (Henry Holt, 1996). He published his first poetry collection, Branches of The Tree of Life: The Collected Poems of Abiodun Oyewole 1969-2013 (2014), released the rap CD, 25 Years (1996), and the song albums, Gratitude (Sons Rising Entertainment, 2014), and Love Has No Season (2014). He is the editor of Black Lives Have Always Mattered, A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives (2017), and the author of The Beauty of Being, A Collection of Fables, Short Stories & Essays (2018). Over the years, Oyewole has collaborated on more than a dozen albums and several books. He writes poetry almost every day, travels around the world performing poetry and teaching workshops, gives lectures on poetry, history and politics, and holds a weekly salon for artists, poets and writers in his home in Harlem, New York.
See Oyewole websites at https://www.abiodunoyewole.net, and The Last Poets at https://www.thelastpoets.com.
Quote: Patrick A. Howell, "Hold Sacred Our Humanity: A Conversation with Abiodun Oyewole," Los Angeles Review of Books, October 1, 2020
