Jayne Cortez

Acclaimed as original, versatile, and multifaceted, Jayne Cortez (USA) is a poet whose extraordinary career includes literary success and impassioned activism inspired by the ideals of human dignity and social justice. Cortez is considered to be the primary link between the creative sound-based poetics of the Black Arts Movement and what became synonymous with poetry in the last years of the twentieth century: hip hop and performance poetry. Cortez has been writing and performing her poetry for over 40 years at museums, universities, and festivals throughout the United States, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Her poetry, which has been translated into twenty-eight languages, fuses politics with surrealism, and blends traditional poetry with the African oral and aural traditions, American black culture, jazz, and blues. Cortez, who has described her work as a mix of art and politics, as well as confrontational. Her work has been included in several anthologies, journals, and magazines. Cortez has published ten volumes of poetry, recorded nine albums, and she has received numerous awards. In addition, she has appeared in the Canadian film, Poetry In Motion and in the film Women in Jazz. She also participated in the music video Nelson Mandela is Coming and her poem, I Am New York City, was featured in an episode of Tribeca, the Fox television network series.

Her career as a social activist is impressive. Cortez traveled to Mississippi in 1963 to help register black voters. In 1964 Cortez organized writing and drama workshops in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, ultimately co-founding the Watts Repertory Theater Company. Like many other black artists who wanted control over their work, Cortez established her own publishing company, Bola Press, in 1972. She co-founded, and is president of, the Organization of Women Writers of Africa. A tireless organizer, she coordinated the Yari Yari International Conference of Women Writers of African Descent as well as directed the film Yari Yari. She also helped to organize the international symposium, Slave Routes: The Long Memory and was a participant in a round table discussion at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000.

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